Teaching and Research

It’s true that you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school (not that this is necessarily a good thing). Having an advanced degree does not make you (necessarily) a better teacher.

The common wisdom, however, that, at the university level, professors with advanced degrees are so distracted by research that they don’t or can’t really teach, is false. Research by Robert McCaughey, chair of the history department at Barnard College, across a number of universities shows the strong correlations among research, advanced degrees, recognition from colleagues, and great teaching. The best teachers in universities, as ranked by their unforgiving students, are those who have contributed to their fields, obtained the highest degrees, and kept open and alive their commitments to research and to teaching—these are, at a high level, one and the same.

I believe the same could apply to high school, elementary school, and even early childhood teachers.
Let me examine briefly what it takes to get a master’s degree.

You start with some ideas about graduate school and a fear of formal writing. You haven’t been in school in years, maybe decades. You don’t know how to cite a reference according to the Style Manual of the American Psychological Association or the Modern Language Association. Until now, you have had better things to do.

You want to write a thesis that will change the wacky Waldorf world, bite off a big piece of research and chew it well. Colleagues will read your work and recognize your expertise. Journals will seek you out. Young children with wide eyes will ask for your autograph. You also want to graduate on time.

Your advisor and your cohort help you find and hone some topic in which you’re interested, something not too large or too small. About 45 pages worth, give or take. You talk through topic, questions, methods, literature with your advisor. You badger your spouse and colleagues. You can’t sleep. You pile books on a table or nightstand. Good job. As my wife says, if you buy the fabric, you’ve made the quilt.

You type the title page, including the statement at the bottom, “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements…” You feel like you’re halfway there.

You write a sentence, a paragraph. You type quotations into a laptop or, like me, you stick an army of post-its into your books. Progress.

Gradually, you steal hours here and there. Your husband take the kids to his parents for the weekend and, after watching five hours of television, folding all the laundry, and cleaning the kitchen, you start to write. As David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, says, “everyone knows it takes eight hours to write for two hours.”

In Milan, a monk complained that Leonardo da Vinci, who was supposed to be painting “The Last Supper,” spent too much time sitting in front of the painting doing nothing. Who knew? Leonardo wasn’t just a painter and an original thinker. He was a graduate student. Really, of course, like you, he was deep in contemplation.

Gradually, your work takes shape. You fill it in like a puzzle: A bit of chapter three, some more in chapter two. It hurts, but you throw away whole paragraphs that no longer fit. If you’re like me, you cut these but you can’t stand to see them go. I paste them, in order, at the end of the paper. Sometimes what I end up with is shorter than the unused paragraphs stuck at the end, waiting in vain for their moment. I wrote them. They must mean something.

You start talking nonsense, a sign of regression in normal people, but not you; you’re a graduate student. You believe you know what you mean when you type something like, “hermeneutic contemplation and theoretical misgivings in the Weltanschauung of the Zeitgeist.” I gave my wife a few pages to edit. She said, “I don’t understand a word of this.” “Good,” I said, “my education is working.”

You’ve never interviewed anyone in your life, but you do it. You draw up a list of questions, make an appointment, and, before you know it, you’ve completed an interview of an hour and a quarter. Interviews are easier after this, although why do people insist on talking about what they want to talk about instead of what you want to know about?

Or you write a questionnaire and mail it out. A few people even send it back. But instead of filling in the ovals you’ve provided, they’ve written comments in the margins. Or circled two answers where you asked for one. You are learning to collect and interpret data.

Things take shape. When ninety percent is complete, you’re halfway there. You track down those missing references. You try to write a conclusion that’s not just a re-statement of your introduction. Despite the demands of job and family, you make progress. Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, when asked about his life between performances said, “You know, I have a second career running errands.

You get emails from the college with forms A through H attached. These supersede the old forms A through H you got last semester, and they have no relation to the handbook you got when you started this work.
You stay up until four one morning, putting on the finishing touches. You email a draft to your advisor and then wait weeks… and weeks. You’ve taken years to do this, but you want a response immediately.

You finally get your paper back, and then you get to comb through to remove the passive voice, rewrite the introduction, cut unsupported statements, trim and groom your baby.

The great day arrives when your thesis is approved. You feel like you lost fifty pounds, like an astronaut on the moon, like a childhood dream of flying. And then you eat half a pound of pepperoni from the little zip-loc baggie, inhale a pint of Chunkie Monkey, and take a nap.

What did you learn? You learned a lot, but I’m not talking about your topic.

Here are some of the things you learned:

To think clearly and contemplatively.
To speak meaningfully.
To write well.
To read with interest and intelligence.
To have a sense of scale and proportion.
To appreciate objectivity as a goal, if not as an absolute.
To adapt to changing circumstances.
To synthesize disparate and unanticipated results and points of view.
To interpret.
To judge.
To persevere.
To compromise.
To find and create a community of support in which to accomplish all this.

These are qualities I would like to see in all teachers.

And, you’ll notice, I haven’t even mentioned the thesis topic. From this point of view, the topic, the form, the content, the results are all beside the point. No one else will ever read your thesis. Your husband and your second reader and your advisor read it because they love you. And because they had to. These things are not mutually exclusive.

The point is the capacities that you have to exercise and develop in order to complete a degree. Yes, some of it is inherited from the Middle Ages, the caps, the gowns, the inquisition. And perhaps those parts are what people object to when they say you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school.

I don’t mean to minimize the research that goes into this work. But to be a researcher does not always mean to write formal papers, although these are an accepted medium for such work.

To conduct research is to be alive to possibility, to believe that there’s truth beyond simply the truth that I know today, and this is one of the highest qualities that we can ask for in a teacher, a quality that makes teaching so creative and so difficult and so humbling.

Teachers are researchers. They conduct action-research and longitudinal studies as participant-observers with sample sizes of a couple of dozen over years. They discuss findings with colleagues and fellow-researchers from next door and down the hall. (What they often fail to do is synthesize and interpret their results.) And the better prepared they are to conduct their research, the better for our children.

What is Waldorf Education?

The following essay appears in slightly different forms and with slightly different titles as the introduction to a brief collection of Rudolf Steiner's lectures, What is Waldorf Education? as part of a chapter of my dissertation, Promise and Compromise: A History of Waldorf Schools in the United States, 1928-1998, and as an article in the Research Bulletin for Waldorf Education.

To the degree that this essay appears complete or polished, it masks the process by which I arrived at its conclusions. I set out to define Waldorf education simply by evaluating what Rudolf Steiner and others had claimed it was. At that point, I didn't realize that a ready, decent definition didn't exist. But the more I looked, the less I found.

I was simultaneously reading Owen Barfield and others, working toward an understanding of what Barfield calls "objectifying consciousness." And, one day, it struck me: to speak of "Waldorf education" is to indulge objectifying consciousness.

This realization led me to the following essay; it sent me on a search for what Steiner didn't say (see "Playing 'Steiner Says'"); and it led me to attempt to distill or characterize what it is that we mean when we talk about something called Waldorf education (see "What Makes Waldorf, Waldorf?"). These three essays constitute a whole; the other two appear here already, and this, the first, completes the group.

Introduction

Waldorf education does not exist. It is not a “thing,” and it cannot necessarily be distinguished from good education anywhere. Because it does not exist, it cannot be found in the boxes we call Waldorf schools. To narrow its definition to identify it with schools named Waldorf or Steiner schools, or to identify it with a particular curriculum or technique is to reify Waldorf education in a way that may describe part of what is but necessarily ignores what may also be. What we call Waldorf education may perhaps be found in any school, or anywhere that teachers teach and students learn. There is no characteristic or quality that is unique to what we call Waldorf education that cannot potentially be found somewhere else. Waldorf education, as an idea or set of ideas, slips through the cracks of any structure erected to define it.

Just as Waldorf education has no definite boundaries, it also has no definite origin. We may describe Waldorf education, for example, as arising from the educational conceptions of Rudolf Steiner. But many (most? all?) of these conceptions--for example, the idea that, culturally, at least, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (the development of an individual mirrors in microcosm the development of the species)--may be shown to be older than Steiner and therefore not to originate with him. (Beyond inferences from Steiner’s work, the idea that “the” Waldorf curriculum must include Norse myths in fourth grade or Greek history in fifth grade--curricular practices common in Waldorf schools--is difficult to discover. It’s not in well-known lecture cycles that he gave on education, nor is it in The Study of Man and its correlates, nor may it be found in Stockmeyer’s or Heydebrand’s well-known descriptions of German Waldorf school curricula.) In particular, for the United States, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson contain in prototypical form many of Steiner’s ideas about education.

Emerson and the Waldorf Curriculum

Emerson’s essay “History”, for example, presents an encapsulated curriculum that mirrors closely the general curriculum of many Waldorf schools. His language, too, mirrors Steiner’s in addressing the intellectual and emotional maturation of one person as, in part, a recapitulation of the intellectual and cultural developments to be found in human history.

The following quotations from “History” demonstrate the correspondence that Emerson finds between history and individual growth and development. This evolution of ideas is presumably based on knowledge of ancient cultures or at least exposure to them. Someone who had never heard of the Greeks, nor been exposed to their cultural influence even in a dilute or adulterated form, could not be expected in ontogeny to recapitulate this aspect of a cultural phylogeny. On the other hand, as Emerson implies at the end of the first two quotations, the state of being Greek, in the sense of “the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body,” may be universally human even for those who do not name it by the same name as Emerson:

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. (123)

In many Waldorf school fifth grades, when teachers claim students have achieved a grace and harmony of body and spirit that will soon be disrupted by the travails of puberty and adolescence, the class holds a Greek “Olympiad,” competing for laurels in javelin, discus and running races, striving as much for form and beauty as for victory. As well, Greek myths make up a significant portion of the literature of the fifth grade in many Waldorf schools.

The comparison between Emerson’s writings and Steiner’s is a study in itself. One more example will suffice here. For both Steiner and Emerson, the study of nature can guide and give meaning to personal experience. Neither means by nature what we might call “environmental studies,” although these would not be excluded; each means that symbolic meaning may be found in the reflective examination of the world around us.

It is essential that the secrets of Nature, the laws of life be taught to the boy or girl, not in dry intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before the soul of the child in such a manner that behind the parable he divines and feels, rather than grasps intellectually, the underlying law on all existence. “All that is passing is but a parable,” must be the maxim guiding all our education in this [elementary school] period. (Steiner, 1965, 33)

Here is Emerson on the same topic:

I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. …Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. (127)

Steiner’s thinking is often prefigured in Emerson’s, but this is not to say that they are the same. Toward the end of his essay “Education”, Emerson (1966) tosses in a towel that Steiner held onto like a bulldog: “I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching.” (225) Steiner, in concert with Emil Molt and a host of others, set out to reform our ways of teaching in a myriad of concrete ways. But, while broad and systematic, few or none of these ways were as original as we might believe, nor were they meant to be particular to some schools and not others.

A Unique Method?

Separate from the ideas in or behind Steiner’s conception of education, we might describe Waldorf education as a particular method. When we define method, however--and certainly in the case of Waldorf education we are not talking about a collection of techniques or a bag of tricks, but a method in a larger sense--we omit important elements of Steiner’s thinking. As Michael Lipson, recent translator of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, put it, somewhat cryptically, Steiner’s method is a “methodless method” that must be continually re-invented by each teacher for each student in order to be valid (Private communication, November 20, 1999). And if we use a more mundane definition of method, and speak of a particular curriculum or set of teaching techniques, Waldorf education still eludes capture. Schools that are not Waldorf schools and teachers who are not Waldorf teachers use, perhaps increasingly, techniques and conceptions of education identical to those propounded by Steiner, even though many of these teachers may never have heard Steiner’s name. “Looping,” in which one teacher stays with a particular class for several years, and block scheduling, in which one subject is studied intensively for a relatively brief time, are two such techniques. While no other school of which I know even approximates the curriculum found in a typical Waldorf school, there is nothing to prevent such adoption.

The Doctor Didn’t Say

One step toward recognizing that there is no such thing as Waldorf education is to realize that Rudolf Steiner himself rarely spoke or wrote about Waldorf education. The annotated bibliography of his collected works lists only a handful of references to “Waldorfschulpaedagogik,” “Waldorf School pedagogy.” He did speak and write at great length about education; how children grow and develop and learn, and how teachers may teach them. Further, in his work, Steiner claimed no particular originality. He did not see a discontinuity between what came before him and his own work. In his seminal pamphlet, The Education of the Child (1965), for example, Steiner quotes Jean Paul approvingly and at length. The sense one gets reading Steiner’s work, and this applies as well to his writings and lectures on matters other than education, is that ideas, like apples, lead an objective existence, and may be plucked by anyone. We might say that the “method” of Waldorf education is to learn to pluck these apples for oneself, as student or teacher, and not to rely on the authority of Rudolf Steiner to hand one already-picked apples. The analogy holds in that we may no more reify Waldorf education than we may divorce apples from the tree, sun, soil of their birth. Ideas, like apples, exist in and arise out of a context.

Staking a Claim

While I dispute the existence of “Waldorf” education, I do not dispute the existence of a group of schools that have chosen to identify themselves with the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart by calling themselves Waldorf schools, or to identify themselves with statements about education made by Rudolf Steiner by calling themselves Steiner schools. These schools have had a life of their own for more than seventy years in the United States, and have made a powerful claim on the ideas lumped under the term “Waldorf education.”

I cannot define or describe Waldorf education well, but I can investigate how others have defined or described it. I will begin outside the United States to include some of what Steiner himself said about what we now call Waldorf education. I will then focus on the strategies that writers and teachers in the United States have used to write about Waldorf education. (To see how Steiner’s conceptions of education made their way from Germany and Switzerland to the United States, see Ida Oberman’s study, 1999. Not available, unfortunately, is a similar account of the influence of British Waldorf schools and teachers on the United States. This is a study waiting to be written.)

Compromise

Moreover, I should like to point out to you that the real aim and object of our education is not to found as many schools as possible… but our education concerns itself with methods of teaching, and it is essentially a new way and art of education, so every teacher can bring it into their work in whatever kind of school they happen to be… and I have declared that the methods can be introduced into every situation where someone has the good will to do it. (Steiner, R. The Roots of Education, p. 30)

Some will acknowledge the validity of this passage but insist on a distinction between those who employ a “compromised” version of Steiner’s method (“Waldorf-inspired” schools or teachers) and “real” Waldorf schools that have deliberately dedicated themselves to this method. I maintain, however, that all manifestations of Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas are necessarily compromised. Schools that see themselves as pure because they are independent of the potentially corrupting influence of government money may be compared with schools, like the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, a choice school within the Milwaukee public school system, that have made overt compromises to meet present requirements regarding the separation of church and state. (One of these compromises has been to eliminate the word “God” from a verse that children in the school say each morning.) The Milwaukee school’s compromise is a deliberate choice made in order to facilitate other educational objectives, especially the education of relatively poor urban children. Independent (non-public) Waldorf schools, on the other hand, have clearly chosen, if not so deliberately, not to serve poor and near-poor students like those who attend the Milwaukee school. This choice is also a compromise.

Three of a Kind: Strategies and Descriptions

A First Strategy: Waldorf Schools ARE Waldorf Education

Existing descriptions of Waldorf education can be characterized according to three strategies. The first and simplest is to let Waldorf schools stand for a description; what goes on in Waldorf schools is inferred to be, by definition, Waldorf education. Ida Oberman’s otherwise excellent history, Fidelity and Flexibility in Waldorf Education, 1919-1998, slips into this mode, examining the histories of Waldorf schools in Germany and the United States, implying that these add up to a larger history of Waldorf education. To further her discussion she uses the concept of a “cultural field,” a metaphorical container for Waldorf education. Just as the field is a metaphor, so too is Waldorf education.

Stephen Talbott also uses this first strategy in an appendix to the also otherwise excellent book The Future Does Not Compute. He asks, “What is Waldorf Education?” and answers with a description of the founding of the first school and a description of a generalized curriculum. (424)

If Waldorf education were a consistent and prescribed method and curriculum, these analogies might suffice--although their definition is circular. But what goes on in Waldorf schools varies from place to place and time to time. There is no single characteristic, in fact, without which a Waldorf school cannot exist, nor that defines a school as a Waldorf school. Mentally erase beeswax crayons, or a eurythmist, or even the morning verse. A school without these items could still fulfill Steiner’s wishes for the education of children, I believe. Waldorf education simply cannot be seen as the accumulation or collection of some (even infinite) number of defining characteristics. To indulge such a fragmented view is to give credence to a reductionism that Waldorf education stands against.

A Second Strategy: Pigeonholes

The second strategy is to pigeonhole Waldorf education according to some cultural or historical characteristic that, while real enough within a particular context, may not be necessary or sufficient to describe something larger called Waldorf education. Waldorf education is defined only partially if it is defined as a reform movement, for example. To the extent that authors acknowledge the contingency of such synecdochical definitions (definitions in which the part stands for the whole), they may be serviceable, if incomplete.

Henry Barnes and the Movement

Henry Barnes, author and long-time history teacher and faculty chairman at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, characterizes Waldorf education as a particular movement: “As one of the most rapidly growing yet least known independent, nonsectarian school movements in the free world today, Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf education should be brought to the attention of all serious students of education.” (323) This may be true, but Waldorf education is only “independent” [of public education in the United States] and only a “movement” in the here and now.

Barnes writes, “This article will briefly outline the history of the Waldorf movement and seek to give an introduction to the philosophy and methods that underlie it.” (323) Philosophy and methods sound promising; they may extend beyond consideration of Waldorf education as a movement. For Barnes, the philosophy is based on two major principles or insights. The primary or defining principle of Waldorf education is an image of the human being:

Behind the Waldorf curriculum, its methods of instruction, and all the many practical aspects one thinks of when one thinks of a Waldorf school today stands the idea of man and of child development from which they all spring. It is this idea that gives them meaning and, in the end, is the basis on which the [Waldorf education] movement will have to be evaluated and judged. (326)

To speak of the education of a child necessarily implies a concept of what or who this child is. Historical examples abound, including Locke’s “tabula rasa,” Rousseau’s good “natural man” Emile, Jonathan Edwards’ very different “natural man” in original sin, and Dewey’s concept of the child in community. For Barnes, Waldorf schools attempt to educate according to Rudolf Steiner’s image of a human being:

In Steiner’s view, the human being can never be fully understood in terms of his heredity and the impact of his environment. Beyond them lies the essential core of human individuality, which cannot be defined in material terms. That central entity, the human ego, is perceived by Steiner to be supersensible and eternal, revealing itself by reflection in the personality who is active here in time and space. It is the educator’s responsibility to help this personality to develop in such a way that it can become a fitting vehicle through which the real ego can express itself. (326)

Note that Barnes refers to “educators” in the last sentence quoted, not to “Waldorf educators.” The virtual brand name “Waldorf” is a label attached after Steiner, not by Steiner. The label “Waldorf” represents an increasing objectification of ideas that were initially less defined and therefore more open to play and experiment than they often seem.

The words “in Steiner’s view” and “perceived by Steiner” are almost extraneous here. Steiner is certainly not the only nor the first person to speak of a human being as more than the sum of genes and environment. If he, and others who find the world this way, are correct, then inferences regarding education follow not from authority but from a perceived reality. Where reference to Steiner should be inserted in the quotation above is in the last sentence. “[For Steiner,] it is the educator’s responsibility...” Even here, Steiner is not unique, although his lectures and writings certainly constitute the most thorough and systematic approach to education from this perspective.

Barnes’ point is that the “supersensible and eternal” incarnate in the world, according to Steiner, gradually and in a specific fashion. Education, therefore, should be conducted in accordance with what is known about this process of incarnation. Hence, the methods and curricula derive from this view.

For Barnes, a second principle grows from the first; because the human self is seen to incarnate over a period of years, education must address this development, which is seen to occur in three broad stages lasting roughly seven years each. (Many writers on Waldorf education treat these as if they were universal, when Steiner himself made it clear time and again that he was describing something that was historically and culturally true, not true everywhere and for all time.) The method and curriculum similarly derive from these principles, and provide the particulars visible to any visitor to a Waldorf school, including instructional materials and subject matter. These will likely include relatively featureless rag dolls, beeswax crayons, watercolor paints, colored chalk, stories of Christian saints, Norse and Greek Myths, and any number of other things. But the rhetorical question still begs, does any of these make a Waldorf school?

Barnes’s consideration of methods and philosophy extends his definition beyond the merely synecdochical, but his discussion here speaks best to education in general, not to “Waldorf” education.

Oberman’s Objectification

Ida Oberman’s history of Waldorf education also offers an objectified view. For her, “Waldorf” is a “unique” “German” “progressive” “alternative” “reform initiative” or “institution” which has “embedded” in it “an ideology, a belief system called Anthroposophy.” All of these descriptions may apply to “Waldorf education,” but each could change radically without disturbing Steiner’s contributions to ways of teaching.

Oberman locates sources for the curriculum of the first Waldorf school in Steiner’s intellectual biography, but, having shown its somewhat contingent nature, then treats it as an object to be relocated wherever “Waldorf” roots. Oberman shows how different people—Hermann von Baravalle, Marie Steiner and Ita Wegman—and different schools—the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, the Kimberton Waldorf School, and the Sacramento Waldorf School—adopt different strategies (“purity,” “accommodation,” and “evolution”), but not how curricula reflect their origins in Steiner’s work and in the time and place of their implementation.

Among the evidence for this point of view is Oberman’s insertion of the bracketed qualifier “Waldorf” into a quotation in which it did not formerly appear: “The faculty now active at the school have proven...their willingness to continue this [Waldorf] work, which represents the noblest of German cultural life for all to see.” (1999. Emil Molt and Duke Fritz von Bothmer, p. 134) It is clear that Oberman sees the work as “Waldorf” work, but this is her own objectification.

A Third Strategy: School Functions

A third strategy involves some function or group of functions that Waldorf education performs (is claimed to perform). If the difficulty of the last definition is that it is too narrow—what is does not define what else may be—the difficulty of a functional definition is that it is too broad. Good education of any kind will necessarily perform certain functions that cannot simply be claimed for, let’s say, Waldorf education. Waldorf teachers are not the only teachers to claim a developmental view of their students, nor the only to find some aspects of human individuality that cannot be attributed solely to the interaction of heredity and the environment. Further, it does not appear that there is some unique set of functions that only something called Waldorf education performs.

Eugene Schwartz’s Functionalism

For Eugene Schwartz, Waldorf education is a method, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, who “begins with a qualitative intelligence that is unitary and suggests that the task of education is to multiply it. If [Howard] Gardner’s theory concerns itself with ‘multiple intelligences,’ then Steiner’s approach might be called ‘intelligent multiplicity.’” (151)

Further, Schwartz describes Waldorf education as a “‘will first’ pedagogy” or “methodology” that aims to “educate the child in accordance with principles that ask us to honor and work with the soul and spiritual nature of the youngster.” (157) While this sounds vague, it is only his introduction into a more specific examination of methods and techniques that teachers may use.

As for setting these ideas in a context as large as that of Barnes or Curran (see below), I don’t believe Schwartz sees this as a helpful goal; his more immediately practical goal is to show how Waldorf education can function to address the needs of children in a particular place and time. That is, he is concerned with the “will” education of children in wealthy industrialized countries.

A Look at the Map

Eugene Schwartz also approaches the function of Waldorf education by analogy. Like a map, Schwartz posits, a curriculum can be understood on three levels. The first, a global, geophysical map, remains valid for centuries. For Schwartz, Steiner’s description of child development is such a durable aspect of Waldorf education. Development itself may change, but only slowly. School subjects—history, math, and so forth—change more rapidly, and have been modified significantly over the decades since Waldorf education began. These are akin to a political map, which may change more rapidly. An up-to-date road map, however, must “come alive every day.” The clear advantage of Schwartz’ analogy is that it neatly allows for both relatively unchanging and continually changing aspects of Waldorf education. One danger of this view, however, is that agreement on the unchanging aspects of the map may be perceived as dogma—unchanging and therefore unquestioned. The history of geology shows, however, that while the earth appears to change slowly, our views and interpretations of that change can be revised radically from one year to the next. The notion that Waldorf education is a thing, however immaterial, has developed so surreptitiously over the past decades that we have not noticed the change. Our map has not changed much, perhaps, but we may be in danger of mistaking the map for the thing itself.

A Quality of Education

Each of the strategies outlined above makes Waldorf education into a thing, whether a material thing like a school, or an ideological thing like a movement, or a mental thing like a function. Not all writers on Waldorf education, however, resort to these three strategies. Those who perceive Waldorf education not as a thing but as a quality of education demonstrate a different possibility for description.

Peter Curran on Waldorf Education

Peter Curran, graduate of Bowdoin College and long-time history teacher at The Waldorf School of Garden City, adopts a strategy similar to Barnes’s in describing Waldorf education, but then ventilates it immediately to include, potentially, all schools, not a particular subset. Following his retirement in the late 1980s, Curran set down some of his ideas about Waldorf schools. Particularly, he believed that there were four “essentials,” “without which no school (by whatever name) is a Waldorf School and with which any school is a Waldorf School.”

I. …As each child’s consciousness matures, it recapitulates the cultural epochs of all Mankind. Waldorf education agrees with Emerson when he says that all children go through a Greek period and a Roman period, etc. There is, then, a proper time and method for particular subjects to be taught.
II. Since no one destroys what one loves, reverence, awe and respect for the Earth should be fostered. An inkling of the spirituality of the Earth then comes into being.
III. The qualitative, as well as the quantitative, in all things should be equally developed.
IV. Above all, Man is known as a spiritual as well as a physical being.

Curran’s statement poses a realism to Barnes’s nominalism in that the enactment of these principles does not depend on the presence or absence of the name “Waldorf.”

Of Curran’s four principles, the first and last are potentially controversial, while the middle two may be found in many classrooms and schools. The first, the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” statement, is probably the least familiar to most educators, and it may be the most dated, arising out of Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being”. (See, for example, Lovejoy, 1936 and 1964) Few, if any, schools other than Waldorf schools today organize themselves around such a principle. Still, there is nothing to prevent them doing so if they choose. (Nor, if Waldorf schools found a different central metaphor, would they necessarily cease to be good schools.)

Last, some contemporary interpretations of the anti-establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might prevent Curran’s fourth principle from being overtly applied in public schools, but the concept is hardly unique among independent schools. Some Waldorf teachers may argue that principle four may be found in many schools, but that Waldorf schools mean something different by “spirit”. I’m not convinced of this, however, and, in any event, it needn’t be so.

Douglas Sloan’s “Education of the Imagination”

Douglas Sloan, retired Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, NY, worked diligently through writing and teaching to present an open-minded approach to Waldorf education. In Insight-Imagination, he describes Waldorf education sensitively in his discussion of a larger “education of the imagination.” (211)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) wrote of the “primacy of perception”: “all consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves… The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” (13) For Sloan, the faculty of “imagination” necessarily accompanies perception, without which we would live in William James’ “buzzing, blooming confusion.” For Sloan, imagination is not simply one faculty among others—empathy or cognition, say--to be strengthened through an enhanced curriculum. Imagination is the necessary wellspring of human experience of the world:

…it is only through imagination that we have any knowledge whatsoever. …The imagination, the image-making power of the mind …shapes our everyday perception of the world, for there is no perception separate from interpretation. (140)

Similarly to Barnes, Sloan describes Waldorf education according to a conception of educational stages. After briefly examining Piaget with regard to stages, however, Sloan qualifies his statements: “Any conception of educational stages must… stand constantly ready to be reevaluated and revised in the light of new evidence from any field of research….” (212) For Sloan, Waldorf education does not approach a faith, nor was it created ready-made by Rudolf Steiner, to be preserved in perpetuity like a Colonial reenactment. “Such a conception of education must as a whole remain open and subject to revision….” (212) Waldorf education is an evolving model of educational thinking, research and practice, and must be created anew in each application if it is not to devolve into prescription or dogma.

Nancy Parsons Whittaker’s Open Door Policy

Nancy Parsons Whittaker is a translator of Steiner’s work into English and a founder and administrator of “www.bobnancy.com”, a website devoted to Waldorf education. The paragraphs that follow do not set forth a thing-like definition, but attempt to throw open the doors of a somewhat cloistered “movement”:

I believe that the educational movement Steiner founded drifted very far from its source the moment [the act of] founding schools became more important than examining the quality of education the children were receiving and working to really convey the approach to other teachers in all manner of schools and situations. What we call “Waldorf Education” has largely come to mean a set of curricula and specific ways of introducing specific subject matter. This has nothing (in my opinion) to do with the original intent, which was to convey the attitude, the viewpoint toward the children and toward society (any society) with which a teacher could fully meet the physical, mental and spiritual needs of both the students and their community.

Any school is a Waldorf school if the intent of Steiner’s pedagogy is being met within its halls. What was the intent? The intent was to offer an education in a way that gave each child a fundamental, true introduction into the foundation of his or her society while at the same time enhancing that child’s ability to accurately perceive life around him or her without damaging the child’s innate capacity to be sensitively aware of the Creative Love behind the visible world (whatever that capacity might have been, whether large, small or nearly nonexistent—the teaching was not intended to train a student’s spiritual vision, just not to damage what already existed). The education was not intended to found schools separated from their society at large nor was it intended to model a particular belief system.

These goals can be met in a wide variety of settings, with an infinitely wide possibility of curricula, through the myriad possibilities of human personality.

A Necessary Lack of Definition

I used to have a bumper sticker that read “Waldorf Education” on two lines, “Waldorf” above and “Education” below. I returned to long-term parking after a research trip to discover that someone had neatly sliced off the word “Waldorf”, who knows why, leaving a narrow bumper sticker that read simply: “Education”. I started to remove it but stopped. It’s still on my car.

Those who aim deliberately not to objectify Waldorf education can avoid the pitfalls of reification, synecdoche, or function. These writers necessarily leave Waldorf education undefined, and characterize it in refreshingly open terms. Waldorf education becomes not a thing, not a kind or brand of education, but a quality of education. And qualities, like colors, like the warmth of a heart, may expand boundlessly.

Conclusion

Steiner relates the following anecdote about his time in the Waldorf School: “Whenever I come to Stuttgart to visit and assist in the guidance of the school, I ask the same question in each class, naturally within the appropriate context and avoiding any possible tedium, ‘Children, do you love your teachers?’ You should hear and witness the enthusiasm with which they call out in chorus, ‘Yes!’ This call to the teachers to engender love within their pupils is all part of the question of how the older generation should relate to the young.” (1995)

We are all older than some and younger than others; we learn from some and we teach others. If we foster the relationship Steiner describes here, then we participate in an education that honors the memory of Rudolf Steiner.

References

Barnes, H. (1980) An introduction to waldorf education. In Teachers College Record, 81 (3), Spring 1980; pp. 322-336,
Curran, P. (1990) Unpublished typescript.
Emerson, R. (1966) Education. In Emerson on education: Selections, H. Jones (Ed.). Teachers College Press: New York.
Lovejoy, A. (1936 and 1964) The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The primacy of perception and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics, J. Edie (Ed.) Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Oberman, I. (1999) Fidelity and flexibility in Waldorf education, 1919-1998. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services.
St. Charles, Dorothy, interview by Alan Chartock, WAMC radio, 90.3 FM, Albany, NY, April 1994.
Schwartz, E. (1999) Millennial child: Transforming education in the twenty-first century. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Sloan, D. (1983) Insight-Imagination: The emancipation of thought and the modern world. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
Steiner, R. (1965) The education of the child in the light of anthroposophy, G. & M. Adams (Trans.) Rudolf Steiner Press: New York.
Steiner, R. (1995) The fundamentals of waldorf education. November 11, 1921. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1: Nine Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Steiner, R. (1996) Why base education on anthroposophy? June 30, 1923. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 2: Twelve Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Talbott, S. (1995) The future does not compute: Transcending the machines in our midst. O’Reilly and Associates: Sebastopol, CA.
Whittaker, N. (2001) Post to subscribers of the list server Waldorf@maelstrom.stjohns.edu., Feb. 11. Subscribe at http://www.bobnancy.com. Quoted with author’s permission.

Growing a Small School and Avoiding the Deadly Middle Ground

I'm often asked how we can keep our tiny high school going--23 students this year, our largest number in our eight years. We have no capital, no cash reserve, and no primary source of funding other than tuitions.

The answer has a few parts. First, we're not paid much. Our salaries are based on $40,000 per year, and all teachers (except me) are part-time. I'm full time but, for now, taking only a part-time salary. Our teachers are sometimes shared with our local elementary Steiner School, each school contributing part of a salary and benefits (we don't offer any benefits through our school; we can't yet afford to). Through our brief history, we have been fortunate to find teachers who are willing to work for less than they're worth; in at least three cases, teachers have donated a year of teaching time.

Some of these teachers will move to full-time when numbers of students and numbers of dollars allow this, but many will continue as part-timers, and that's the way we have planned it. Our potter and our blacksmith, for example, work as professionals most of the year and take time out a couple of afternoons a week for part of the school year to teach our students. These men are not art teachers in the conventional sense; they're working professionals who enjoy teaching what they know to adolescents. The students respect their skill and knowledge, and look forward to their classes.

Second, we use community resources. We're an academic school from 8 a.m. to 12 noon most days, and then a "school without walls" in the afternoon. Students head out to Dan Bellow's pottery studio, John Graney's blacksmith's shop, "Mixed Company" theater, Berkshire Pulse dance studio, Mike Bissaillon's BizFit gym, Simon's Rock College library or chem lab or athletic center--Simon's Rock has been extraordinarily generous, allowing us to use facilities for little rent. To rent or pay community use fees or have these venues donated saves a bundle. How much does it cost to build and maintain a studio or a library or a gym? A lot more than the hourly fees we contribute to most of these places. (It has long struck me that we build and operate tremendous facilities for our public and private school students, and then they sit unused most of the year--school is in session about 180 days, and facilities may be used only a few periods of each of those days. It seems so wasteful.)

Third, we combine classes. We believed initially that mixed-age, mixed-ability classes were a necessary compromise to keep the school going. Now, although we may grow, we will work to maintain at least a few combined classes. Older, more advanced students help younger, less advanced students. Class distinctions blur; the artificial divisions of age--where else in your life except a school classroom do these things matter so much?--recede. Math classes--math is sequential and cumulative, no matter how you teach it--are not combined. But all other classes are likely to be, including English, foreign languages, history, science... This requires us often to teach a curriculum over two years--a course offered one year is not repeated the next; something else is taught in its place. But, over the course of four years of high school, each student receives each required course, often in the company of students older or younger than he or she.

We are growing and we plan to grow--we are in the second year of a five-year plan to grow to 40 students, and we may reach our goal early. We grew this year, in a year when most private school enrollments decreased. And interest for next year is already greater than ever before. About half our new students come from a Steiner or Waldorf school background, and about half come from prep school, public school, or homeschool.

We broke even last year, for the first time, with 20 students. We won't show a surplus this year because we will use any extra revenue to improve our program.

We won't grow too large, however, even if we receive more applicants than we plan for. According to our analysis and our methods, a school can make money up to around 60 students. It can also make money with, let's say, 180 students. Between these rough boundaries, however, lurks a "deadly middle ground," in which a school requires facilities and resources that would enable it to educate larger numbers but that cost more than the revenue it generates. It's interesting to us that many Waldorf high schools fall in this middle range.

We plan to cap enrollment at 56 students--that's four classes of 14 students each, exactly enough to fit in a 14 passenger school bus. And a 14 passenger bus is the largest that a teacher can drive without a commercial license. A full enrollment of 56 would allow us to send each class to a different location each day, each in its own bus. More than that, and we'd have to add teachers and resources (including a bus) that would cost more than they're worth.

Kindness in School

According to Henry James, "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind." If this were simply a sentiment striving for power through repetition, it would be worthy only of a Hallmark card. But there are at least three meanings of the word kind. The first and most common is as a simple virtue—sympathy, friendliness, or tenderness. We may practice simple virtues.

Kind also means alike or without distinction. When we draw invidious distinctions between parents and teachers in a school, or between those on the Board and those on the Council or College, or between those who are teachers and those who aren’t, or even between friends and critics, we indulge a harmful fiction. We are alike. We are one kind, and we do our best work when we take this likeness as a given.

Kind also means natural, innate, or native. In this sense it has the same derivation—and is spelled the same—as the German word “Kind,” child. “Except as ye… become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” For teachers, this entrance is a blessing and a curse. Teachers can more easily become as children—open-minded, reverent, and playful; they live with the best possible examples. They can more easily become childish, too. Teachers are those who have chosen to spend most of their time with children. They sometimes treat adults as they do students. (Parents often act like their children, especially within the walls of a school—petulant in preschool, aggressive in middle school, but that’s a different topic).

So Henry James’s injunction can be taken in its repetition in three ways: Be kind. Be one. And be as little children.

Ancient history, Language, and Meaning

One of the greatest challenges in teaching or studying ancient history is to develop, even to a small degree, an appreciation for the consciousness of those who lived in ancient times. They simply didn't mean the same things we mean when they used (in their ancient languages) words like the words we use now.

Take any modern abstract word, as my dear friend Owen Barfield pointed out, and you will find an earlier concrete meaning. "Spirit," for example, which means hardly anything anymore (that is, it means lots of different things to lots of different people and is, consequently, difficult to use with meaning), used to refer to "breath." So the ancients had a concrete, literal consciousness where we have an abstract one.

But that's too easy. Take any modern concrete word, and you will find an earlier symbolic or metaphorical meaning. "Heart," for example, refers to a muscular chest organ, and, more strongly in the past, to qualities associated with heart--sympathy or courage, for example. So the ancients had a symbolic consciousness where we have a literal one.

This reversal is also too easy. Because it's not as if they weren't fully aware--even more aware than we are, as herdsmen, warriors and butchers--of the concrete meaning of heart, as well. So, in ancient times, the symbolic and literal meanings of words were more closely related than they are now. "Heart" meant simultaneously the organ and its associated qualities.

Now, we attach somewhat less meaning to each of our many words but speak our meaning more clearly. We are rarely confused, we are rarely required to examine our sense of ambiguity, when we hear the word "heart."

The ancients attached more meanings to far fewer words--the world was simpler, working vocabularies smaller. This simultaneous simplicity of language and concentration of meaning allowed them to tell and to write stories that were accessible on many levels, for example, stories to which a child could listen but that a wise man could ponder.

The facts of the physical evolution of human beings become ever clearer. But it may be erroneous--and it is certainly a logical fallacy--to believe that this physical evolution must necessarily be accompanied by an evolution from a brute lack of intelligence--a la the cavemen in all the cartoons--toward whereever it is we are now.

If we take seriously a movement of language and meaning back through time from more words and less meaning to fewer words each with more meaning, we may imagine an arrow pointing to the prehistoric past. This arrow points in the general direction of a word containing all meaning, if you will. And "In the beginning was the word."

The Futures of Waldorf Education--Part I

There are roughly 53 million K-12 school children in the U.S.

Of this number, 44 million (83 %) attend public schools.

A few more than 6 million (11 %) attend independent (private) schools.

Approximately 1.5 million (3%) are homeschooled, a number that has grown significantly in the past decade and that continues to grow. Homeschooling, however, seems generally to be a reaction against available options—public or private—rather than a positive choice in itself. Can it represent a viable future for educating children in the U.S.? I don’t believe so.

About 1.1 million (2%) attend charter schools, a number that is growing but, given the grassroots energy required and the opposition of school districts and teachers' unions, also seems unlikely to be a route to the solution of educational ills in the U.S.

Finally, lumping independent and public/charter Waldorf school students together yields a number around 30,000, or 1/18 of 1 percent (.06 percent) of students in the U.S., and perhaps 1/2 of 1 percent of private school students. [The post just previous to this says 25,000, but, as comments point out, I neglected some early childhood programs. Either way, the order of magnitude is correct, if not the number itself.]

The number of independent Waldorf schools, which grew at a rate approximately doubling every ten years from the 1930s through the 1990s, appears to have plateaued. The curve is sigmoid; such a curve is sometimes called a saturation curve. That is, given the configurations of people's lives across roughly the past century, the demand for small, independent, relatively expensive, alternative Waldorf schools may be reaching its limit. Waldorf schools of this type may have saturated their possible markets.

(It also seems like the failure rate for Waldorf schools--which was low--a handful of schools--through the first six decades in the U.S., is increasing. I don't have hard numbers here--I'm working on that. But it does seem like the conditions for the growth of new schools has changed. Maybe they're being founded in some new, less hardy way. Or maybe the climate--cultural, economic--has changed. Or maybe the way they represent Waldorf education has become unpalatable. Regardless, it’s certainly true that service industries—like education—can’t benefit from economies of scale; hence the increasing cost of all education.)

This is not to say that new private Waldorf schools won't continue to be founded, but that their survival will be less assured, their road to sustainability harder. But, without some fundamental change in how Waldorf schools see themselves and conduct themselves--or without some fundamental change in the conditions in which they exist--their growth will be arithmetic, let's say, not geometric.

If the path to the future includes growth, it is likely not private school growth. Perhaps it’s public school growth. There are between 30 and 40 Waldorf charter schools (some call them “Waldorf inspired,” but I don’t care for this distinction) in the U.S., and the number is likely to continue to grow as the charter movement grows. But for how long will this be true? What is the saturation of charter schooling in the U.S.? Urban districts can absorb charter schools, but rural districts cannot. Charter schooling seems not to be a panacea for public education in the U.S., and therefore not a permanent growth area for Waldorf schools.

Homeschooling, too, is burgeoning, and many homeschoolers receive an education that is based on Steiner’s educational ideas. How many homeschoolers use Waldorf methods, and how they interpret them, is impossible to say.

Altogether, however, charter schools and homeschoolers represent fewer than 3 million school-age children. We may estimate that, like private schools, they represent a higher percentage of Waldorf methods than public schools—say 1/2 of 1 percent versus 1/20 of 1 percent, roughly an order of magnitude. If these numbers grow significantly, and if Waldorf methods grow as a constant percentage within this growth, they may represent the most significant possibility for the growth of the number of students receiving an education based on Steiner’s ideas.

In the long run, however—the next decade or beyond—it seems unlikely that charter schools and homeschoolers offer real solutions to whatever ails U.S. education. These movements exist within the framework of intractable teachers’ unions, increasing education costs, and pressure toward standardization from Washington that seems not to change from administration to administration.

How many Waldorf School students are there in the U.S.?

My estimate is around 30,000--about 150 independent schools of approximately 150 each plus another few thousand charter school students. Maybe a few more--if you count homeschoolers, especially--maybe a few less.

Given that there are roughly 50 million K-12 school students in the U.S., that means that about 1/16 of 1 percent are in Waldorf schools of one kind or another. That's a tiny number. To a large, 200 pound person, 1/16 of 1 percent is 2 ounces--a gulp of water, a fish stick. If you make $50,000 per year, 1/16 of 1 percent of that is about $30, barely a tank of gas or a movie night. To put it in further perspective, New York City public schools educate about 1 million students per year, or 33 times as many Waldorf school students as there are in the U.S.

Iron Forging and Metaphor

In his first class, John Graney (http://www.graneymetaldesign.com/) gives each student a length of square iron stock and teaches how to round, taper, flatten, bend, and drill it to form a hook. He also teaches how to maintain a coal fire at the right temperature, and how to tell by color the temperature of the metal.

In two hours, students go from complete novices to novices who have learned a lot, taken a few steps on a path to discipline, and been shown a door through which they may glimpse mastery.

We call blacksmithing a "practical art" in our curriculum, but not because we expect that students will become blacksmiths or because we believe these skills are practical in today's world.

Blacksmithing is practical in a metaphorical sense. It teaches care and balance and consequence--each blow of the hammer impacts the world, literally, as each human thought and action does metaphorically. Light blows don't work and heavy blows damage the work. Rhythm guides the work, and an arhythmic approach fatigues. Cold metal won't forge, and too-hot metal is weak and won't hold its shape. A careless touch leads to a burn, not soon forgotten.

The more I live and teach, however, the less I believe that such work is merely metaphorical. Who is to say that the experience of working with hot metal and a hammer isn't internalized directly, that physical, outer experience doesn't become inner experience, literally? That the lessons of the hand and body don't become lessons of the mind?

If this is so, the reverse is likely so, too. Lessons of the mind become lessons of the body--what we think or have thought visible in the ways we move and work.

C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image

I picked up C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image because I read A.N. Wilson's excellent biography of Lewis this spring, and a mention there made me think I'd like to see it. I'm glad I did.

The "discarded image" to which the title refers is the worldview of human beings in the western hemisphere--Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, European (heavy on the Europeans--this is C.S. Lewis, an Englishman, and what we may call the Middle Ages happened largely in Europe)--between, say, Homer and the Renaissance. Lewis's argument is that in order to understand Medieval literature, it helps to understand the worldview from which it springs. No doubt. And, in going through the literature, brilliantly--is there anything Lewis hasn't read and digested?--and adroitly--his style as a writer is lucid, charming, and respectful--Lewis paints a picture of a world so different from ours it's hard to imagine.

But the task he has set himself is to imagine this world as he discovers it in literature, and he shows us how we may do the same. This, then, is as much an exercise in history and appreciation of historical difference as it is an introduction to literature. The literature becomes the lens through which we see the Medieval mind.

Lewis's tour of the heavens (imagine looking up into a bowl of beautiful, meaningful actors, not out into unfathomably empty space), the earth, and its inhabitants leaves me yearning not to return to those violent, muddy, ignorant times, but to achieve with the benefits of modern consciousness the same relationship to a meaningful world.

For those who find Rudolf Steiner a crank, idiosyncratically spouting nonsense about the spiritual world, The Discarded Image shows, by inference, that Steiner's attempt was not to inject ignorant fantasy into the hard realities of the modern world, but to recover the meaning of spirit, soul, and cosmos as they were understood in earlier times. Read Lewis's exposition of Vegetable Soul and Sentient Soul, based in several Medieval works, and see how these relate directly--they're talking about the same thing--to Steiner's concepts of etheric and astral lives. Find threads going back through the Middle Ages to Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus that illustrate what Huston Smith calls "the perennial philosophy."

Lewis is not espousing one view over another. He's not seeking a return to older ways of thinking and knowing. He acknowledges that the medieval view of the world is largely and fundamentally wrong, or that it contains many untruths.

But he is clear that medieval thinkers were sensitive to the limits of their knowledge, acknowledging the tentative, theoretical or hypothetical nature of their concepts. Toward the end of the book, he contrasts this openness and sensitivity to the insensitive way in which we approach the apparent "reality" that we perceive given not only our scientific knowledge but also our unacknowledged, unquestioned assumptions about the world we believe we live in. In a nod to his friend, Owen Barfield, Lewis notes that the change from the ancient to the modern world is not so much a change in the facts of the world as it is a change in our understanding of what is meant by a theory.

Lewis is clear that much of what Medieval people believed was factually wrong--we needn't quibble about that--but their appreciation for logic, fact, and theory was more highly developed than ours is.

A Dissent on the Wall of Laptops

In the summer of 2000 I walked into a class for the first time to encounter what I came to think of as the Wall of Laptops. Two dozen doctoral students sat around a large conference table, and all but one or two had their laptops proudly open before them. We started class, and it was clear within a few days (maybe within a few minutes to more sensitive types) that this wasn't working. The core of my teaching, based on the methods of the best teachers I had in graduate school, is presentation and discussion. With the Wall of Laptops, presentation became a PowerPoint flogging, each bullet point another not-memorable nail in the coffin of engaged thinking. And discussion became a sort of lobbing out of the foxhole, then back to email checking or whatever went on back there behind the laptop. I put up with it as long as possible, giving the new technology time to work itself out. Then we derailed class for an hour to sort it out. Fortunately, these were adult students who quickly realized what they were doing to themselves and each other. The wall folded and humanity returned.

The following summer, I was pleased to have Ian Parker's "Absolute Powerpoint" from the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/05/28/010528fa_fact_parker) to wave when I requested in the first class that laptops generally be left closed. Here are the first few paragraphs of that excellent article:

Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little
like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the
lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living
in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren’t
listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So,
one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft’s PowerPoint
program, and typed:

FAMILY MATTERS An approach for positive change to the Wyndham
family team
On a new page, she wrote:

·Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members.

·Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life.

·Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family.

Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing of a key—the key to success.
The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to
her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the
Wyndham girls burst into tears.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost
surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an
opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think.
It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize
information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.

I was reminded of this story today when I read "When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom," by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/) The second paragraph of that article reads:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from
using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a
crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for
discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures
online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on
their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates
and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all
about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections
of slides.

Hear, hear.

And all this reminds me of a conversation from earlier in the summer regarding the high school at which I teach. A dad asked his son, a student who could have attended any high school he wished, more or less, private or public, but chose our small Waldorf high school, why he made the decision he did. His son answered something like this: "At every other school I visited, the teacher stood in the front and lectured the kids, who sat there with textbooks. I don't want that kind of learning. At the Waldorf High School, the students sit around conference tables with the teachers and have real discussions. You can ask real questions and get real answers."

I don't know that other Waldorf schools teach this way, but I'm clear that this is a good way to teach. We live in the information age; access to information, for me or my students, is simply not an issue. Conversation, interpretation, and discussion. Listening, thinking, speaking, and writing. These are the roots of engagement with the world, in a classroom or outside it.

For that matter, when I read Rudolf Steiner on education, I picture a much more collegiate model of education than I find in most schools, Waldorf or otherwise. In the U.S., perhaps largely for economic reasons, we have adopted what I call the "Mother Hen" approach to education (this might also be called the "Martyr" approach), in which teachers spend so much time in class, on the playground, at lunch, and even after school with students and colleagues that their focus narrows and so does their engagement with the world. To perpetuate this nurturing-to-the-point-of-smothering model, especially in high school, simply doesn't serve students, parents, or teachers very well. For a high school teacher to model herself after a college professor (the best college professor, that is)--engaged with students and subject and world, not one at the expense of the other--and to bring that engagement in a mature manner to her students, that's educational.

Love and Critics

I have spent some brief time on the Waldorf critics list (if that's what it's called) recently, and I have engaged in a couple of exchanges that I intend to continue when I have time. It is stimulating and challenging to enter a discussion that involves different points of view.

It seems to me that some of the Waldorf critics, at least, actually love Waldorf education and anthroposophy, that the tension between the highly imperfect practices of Waldorf schools and Waldorf teachers and the high ideals that they espouse drives a desire for criticism. As a noted anthroposophist told me once, "I love Waldorf education; it's just the schools I can't stand." Tongue-in-cheek, but, all too often, understandable.

What I mean, for example, is this: I have no interest in astrology. When people at a dinner party start talking about it, I tune out. When I come across references to it in my reading, anthroposophical or otherwise, I tend to start skimming. Astrology may be total bunk or it may contain great truths of which I will remain ignorant. But I just can't bring myself to be bothered. I recognize that others take it seriously, on the one side for its apparent value, and on the other for its apparent idiocy. But to have a stake in a discussion about it is beyond me. And I recognize that I could only have strong feelings about it if it connected to my life somehow. I do not embrace it and I am not critical of it; I am indifferent.

If I grow, eventually, through interest, to love it, fine. If I grow to hate it, however, I must recognize that beyond the hatred is love for something that I wish to see born. In the phenomenon from which I distance myself is a kernel of truth that draws me. (Similarly, as the rabbi said to the atheist, "The god you do not believe in, I also do not believe in.")

To turn this around, if I experienced astrology as connected to my life, I would have strong feelings about it. So, in manifesting strong feelings, great interest--many of the Waldorf critics are as well read in Steiner as any anthroposophists I know--Waldorf critics demonstrate the connection of Waldorf education with their lives.

Unfortunately (from my point of view), whereas my education in a Waldorf school (after nine years in three mediocre public schools) and my experience as a teacher lead me to see great value in it, the experiences of many critics is the reverse. They or their children were wronged by someone or something in Waldorf schools--dogmatic teachers, heedless governance, even educational malpractice. Rather than writing off this experience, however, as we all do with wrongs done to us every day (unless we aim to carry a lot of baggage wherever we go; fewer than one child in one thousand is educated in a Waldorf school in the U.S.; if our primary motive is improving education, there are better ways to spend our time...), some Waldorf critics have engaged with it, in part through their on-line list or group.

Their motives, even if they seek to destroy Waldorf education, are beyond reproach. They aim (as I do) to make the world a better place, and what, in the end, is more loving than that?

Similarly, we may disagree, even after long conversation, but if we shun each other we exclude the possibility of mutual understanding. And there's no love in that.

So-Called "Spiritual Science"

We may swoon with delight or crinkle our noses in disgust at the term "spiritual science," but we should know its origins before we embrace or discount it.

If your daughter told you she was studying humanities in college could you imagine having the same reactions? "Geisteswissenschaft," literally, "spiritual science," refers in German universities to what we call the humanities. It's that simple.

Some claim that Husserl and Steiner, among others, use the term in a "new way," but I would argue that, if anything, they're actually reclaiming its older sense. That is, they aim to understand literature, philosophy, history--the humanities--as clearly and objectively as natural scientists aim to understand the natural world.

Whether or not they succeed, whether or not we agree with their method or findings, this was their project. Owen Barfield sometimes described his work in history and philosphy as aiming at a "science of meaning." I believe this is exactly what Steiner meant by spiritual science, and what we (used to) mean when we studied the humanities.

What are the alternatives to a science of meaning ("science" derives from Latin for "knowledge")? Accept the universe as meaningless? Teach that we each "create our own meaning"? I know it's wimpy not to accept these hard "truths," but, of course, they're not truths, they're assumptions. And I will hold them as such--possibilities not demonstrated--while I pursue the humanities.

Synesthesia, Eye, and Mind

Rudolf Steiner describes beautifully the way a child who wants a sweet wants it with her whole being; that it, we see her desire in her expression, her body, her fingers, her bouncy toes. (We reserved adults have learned to be more circumspect; only our salivary glands might give us away.) It is as if she can already taste the sweet, and, not only that, she experiences this sweetness not just on her tongue or palate, but throughout her being. Her senses are unified in anticipation of sweetness.

Doesn't this remind us of synesthesia, the condition in which a sensory perception produces an automatic, involuntarily perception via another (or more than one other) sense? Those with synesthesia may see colors when they listen to music. They aren't just imagining them, as I might; the colors are diachronically consistent; that is, if you ask the synesthetic person to describe them, record this impression, and return months later, the reaction to and description of the colors for the same piece of music will be virtually unchanged.

This is similar, in fact, to a common test for synesthesia: If you suspect you're synesthetic (many creative persons--Duke Ellington, Wasily Kandinsky, Richard Feynman--have been), write down the digits 0 through 9. For each, record the color impression that each creates in your mind when you look at it. (If this baffles you, you're not synesthetic; stop here.) Put it away for a few weeks or more. Seal it in an envelope, say. Before you open the envelope, write down the same digits in a different order. Record again the colors you associate with each. If you're synesthetic, you should be able to open the envelope and discover a remarkable consistency between your previous perceptions and your current ones.

Even those of us who are not synesthetic have experiences that are similar to this. Most of us experience colors as "warm" (orange, for example), or "cool" (blue, for example). If asked to name an abstract spiky shape, we might choose a name like "Kiki," that has a "spiky" sound; for a rounded blob, perhaps "Bouba." (This is the so-called "Bouba/Kiki effect," and it's been researched.) Even the words "spiky" and "blob," even the letters "B" and "K" record our associations of sound and shape--and these are robust across languages.

Regardless, relating experiences of synesthesia--possibly the most remarkable case is that described by Luria in his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist, about an anonymous, illiterate Russian synesthete with a prodigious memory--common metaphorical experience, and observations of children, isn't it reasonable to say that all of us come into the world synesthetic, our senses undifferentiated? It's only over time, perhaps, the first months or years of life, that our senses differentiate and compartmentalize themselves. We grow into our perceptions and our very way of looking at--and therefore thinking about (remember Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception) the world. If we speak a different language, use our senses differently, have different adults to emulate and imitate, we'll grow not only to think differently and speak differently, but, literally, to perceive differently.

To think that our senses are "objective" apparatuses like cameras or tape recorders is to make a category mistake. Our eye isn't "like" a camera; a camera is like highly sophisticated, mechanically complex aspects of our eye. Our actual living eyes perceive not because they are cameras, but because, as research increasingly demonstrates, of the mind behind them.

(Much more to say; to be continued...)

Mencken, Mencken, Mencken

A former student, who irreverently refers to me as "Big Ass"--I'm large, and this nickname evolved from "Big S," for me and the first initial of my last name--just sent me this quotation:

"The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how
can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Mencken's right, but he doesn't go far enough. It's not just schoolmasters who are essentially an ass; just ask Dogberry ("Much Ado About Nothing"): "But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass..." Sheriffs, too, and all the rest of us--what do we think of bankers at the moment? --are an ass.

To call teaching "puerile" is simply to name an occupation by its inescapable preoccupation.

But to call teaching an "avocation" demonstrates the difference between Mencken's time and ours, or Mencken's mind and mine. I am not an ass avocationally. I am called to be an ass.

Beware "First Grade Readiness"

This post may strike some readers as a minor, picayune point, but to others it may go to the core of their trouble with Waldorf school ideologues.

Many Waldorf schools leave it to kindergarten teachers to determine which children are "ready" for first grade. Parents are told, following assessment, whether or not, in the eyes of these teachers, their child is ready for first grade.

Often, assessments don't take place until late spring, leaving parents anxious and wondering--if my child isn't "ready," will I still have time to get him into another local private school's first grade? Parents may use this waffling to look around. And get excited--or see their children get excited--about the green grass on the other side of the fence.

You see, for parents, the issue is often NOT whether or not the child is "first-grade ready," but whether or not the Waldorf school will promote him. A child judged not to be first-grade ready, in my experience, is more likely to leave the school for first grade somewhere else--another Waldorf school, the local public school. It's relatively rare that parents are so committed to the school or to Waldorf education at all costs that they'll bow to the teachers' judgment in this case.

I'm not saying the teachers are wrong, I'm just saying that the language and process they use can unnecessarily alienate parents. A goal for a school could be to have any family that leaves--after being denied admission or after being counselled out for any reason--to wish fervently that they could have obtained the pearl they sought. Somehow, Harvard manages to do this and Waldorf schools don't.

And isn't such a process like leaving high school admissions to the 8th grade teacher? Or college admissions to high school teachers? Yes, teachers should take into account the recommendations of previous teachers--8th grade, kindergarten--but determination should rest with the school or class or grade the child is entering, in almost every case. "First-grade readiness" should more accurately, less politically, less ideologically, more politely, be called "elementary school admissions."

Most children are simply ready for first grade, anyway, based on "normal" development and birthday. Yet, often, a whole class of parents is held hostage to assessments made late in the kindergarten year. Wouldn't it make more sense to alert the few parents of children for whom there's an issue--a true developmental delay, a real concern over birthdate--and let the others breathe easy? Shouldn't these parents know long before the spring of kindergarten rolls around that there may be some developmental or educational issue that they and their teachers may wish to address?

When children are assessed in the spring of their kindergarten year for admission to elementary school the following fall--half a year away--they still have almost ten per cent of a life to lead! Lots can change...

Another point: Often, children apply directly to first grade, having attended another (non-Waldorf) early childhood program. Are these children shipped to the kindergarten to be assessed? No! They're interviewed by the first grade teacher or her proxy! Why the special treatment? (Really, why the normal treatment?)

I understand that I'm writing about unusual circumstances. But, as a former school administrator, I know that it only takes one angry parent every other year or so to make a school's life really difficult. And don't forget that the early childhood program is the base on which the whole school is built. Small kindergarten? Don't expect a large first grade. Shrinking kindergarten? Your operating budget for the foreseeable future is in jeopardy.

Also, the solution--changing the way we talk about things and not using the phrase "first-grade ready;" talking directly to parents as partners in education; and acknowledging that, after all advice and recommendations, it's up to the elementary school to select the students it can teach--is so easy.

High School Matters: Turning Convention On Its Head

Conventional wisdom around Waldorf education is this: Early childhood "matters" the most--if all you can afford, let's say, is an EC program, that's great. Elementary education "matters" next most; if you can afford to get your children through eight elementary grades at a Waldorf school, you've given them an immense blessing. And, especially given the small number of Waldorf high schools, it's okay for those who can afford it or who are so zealous about the education that they'll make it work for another four year, but it's somehow not essential to the humanizing, imaginative, creative promise of Steiner's educational ideas.

But, when I think of those I know who are active in Waldorf education as teachers, parents, or trustees, and who themselves attended a Waldorf school, I reach a surprising conclusion: High school matters most. At the two Waldorf schools closest to me, of those involved who attended a Waldorf school, almost all attended at least one year of high school. They may have attended elementary school, too. But those who attended only through eighth grade are virtually absent and uncounted. When I think of those I correspond with at other schools who attended Waldorf schools, they, too, overwhelmingly, were present for high school.

I had lunch with a former (Waldorf high school) student of mine today who had this to say: If he had been given the choice in 8th grade, he would have chosen public school for social reasons, primarily. Looking back--he graduated three years ago--he not only recognizes the value of his high school education, but is interested in discussing how such an education can be made available to more and more students. He went through 14 years of Waldorf education, by the way, and recognizes that it was only in high school and afterward that he became conscious of its work on him. He went so far as to say that he believed it was "lost" on many of those who left after eighth grade.

I don't mean at all to demean Waldorf elementary school or those who leave after eight years of it. Far from it; my wife and I sacrificed a lot to make sure our children received this benefit. But there is no way, in my experience, in that of my children, in that of my former student, and in that of many friends, that the full benefits of a Waldorf education are reached after elementary school alone.

Class Size

What’s the ideal class size? Parents in independent schools turn purple and yell if there are too many students in a class—more than 12, 15, or 24. Public schools are under constant pressure to reduce class sizes, and we’re supposed to be outraged that poor-performing districts pack more than 30 children into one classroom.

But parents will do almost anything—and pay twice as much, sometimes—to get their children, the very next year, into universities in which introductory class sizes run in the hundreds!

One of the best graduate students I have had, an articulate and well-educated young woman from India, during a discussion of class size, announced calmly, “Well, my smallest elementary school class was 65 students.”

Research may show that there is some ideal class size (maybe it’s a class of one… Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great). But any ideal class size likely depends on how education is conducted. If we assume that education must consist of 45 minute periods followed by a bell and a change to some unrelated activity (regardless of where we were in the previous class), taught from a textbook in which every fact sits next to every other fact, meaning drained by sameness, taught by a teacher specialist who doesn’t really talk to other teachers, who sees students a few periods a week for a year and then no more, who doesn’t know her students from the local community because she can’t afford to live there and commutes from another town, then we may well scream when class sizes get “too big” and performance fades. If education is an agribusiness, then the efficiencies of agribusiness will apply.

If education is more successfully like organic farming, however, then different values and different efficiencies will apply, and what we think we know of class size may have to be tossed.

Current research points more to SCHOOL size as a factor in educational success—the best schools are those in which each teacher can know each student’s name (and vice versa). And there’s a rush to carve up large schools—following a misguided century of centralization—into smaller “learning communities” of between 200 and 300 students. But the same arguments about agribusiness and organic farming apply here, too—it’s in the system we’ve got that schools perform best at this particular size.

We need to examine the fruits of our system—do we really want a bland, easily shipped but juiceless harvest, disaffected and genetically modified? Thankfully, the harvest is our kids, who grow up to thank us—or rebuke us—for the way they were raised. Everything we need to know is right in front of us.

Crisis Hunting

If you type "united states," "education crisis," and any year from the 1840s--the beginning of compulsory education--to the present, and spend some time sifting through results, you'll quickly discover that education--mostly public primary and secondary education--has been in crisis since its inception. Which raise the question, when will we recognize that to perceive (public) education as perpetually in crisis serves interests--cultural, political, and economic interests--that are not necesarily the interests of children?

Irish Catholic immigrants landing in Boston? Education crisis! Just ask Horace Mann. Soviet satellites orbiting? Education crisis! Just ask Dwight D. Eisenhower. Crises in between, crises since. "Why Johnny Can't Read." "A Nation at Risk." "The Digital Divide."

If you have an ax to grind or a textbook or computer or software to sell or a vote to get, point to the schools and criticize what's going on.

Meanwhile, education hasn't changed that much since Plato sat in the woods with Socrates, since Charlemagne founded Cathedral schools... In "Tinkering Toward Utopia," Larry Cuban and David Tyack show how, despite a century of efforts at school reform, what happens in classrooms remains relatively unchanged.

That's because some ideas that are in the box belong in the box.

Locked in

Paying for (public) education by taxing property, which seemed like a good idea long ago, now appears to be the immoveable object that hinders any real progress in addressing inequity in educational opportunity--and the actual education of real, live children and students--in the United States.

Forget "No Child Left Behind" (which is just the latest manifestation of Republican and Democratic "solutions" to education--remember Reagan and "A Nation at Risk?" Bush the First and "America 2000"? Slick Willy, who simply changed the name of America 2000 to "Goals 2000"?). Federal government money does not pay for education in this country. Neither does state money. Your property taxes, district by district, fund your schools. Nationally, the Democrats are in the pockets of the teachers' unions, and the Republicans all send their children to private school. (Well, when you come to it, so do the Democrats--as soon as they rise high enough to afford it. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

I assigned Emerson's essay "Education" to a class of school administrators at Teachers College. Its fundamental humanity and insight are inspiring. But, as one of my students, an administrator in the Boston public school system said, "Every word of it is true. But what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

The United States has long enjoyed local control of its schools--through school boards, for example--far more than any European education ministry allows. Given the vicious triangle of teachers' union, school board, and textbook manufacturer, however, "local control" usually just means local politics, choice within an increasingly narrow range of tacitly approved options, and unquestioned assumptions about what a curriculum looks like.

Trying to do anything about this nasty property-tax situation brings out the selfishness in any community. Think of Jim Florio, one-term governor of New Jersey, or the fate of Act 60 in Vermont, which simply demonstrated that wealthy ski towns and the novelist John Irving can't think beyond their own green pastures.

I used to teach on Long Island, where some of New York's best public schools--Garden City--live right next door to some of its worst--Roosevelt. The differences? Skin color and tax base. Or, should I say, tax base and skin color.

There's lots of research to show that funding doesn't determine education outcomes--the manicured lawns and swimming pool of the Great Neck public schools cost a lot but don't improve SAT scores, I guess. But a linear analysis is the wrong way to go. Surely there is some minimal or foundational amount per student, separate from administration and building maintenance and bus and cafeteria costs, that ensures a good-enough education, and above which there are perks but diminishing returns.

Then there's James Traub's view the "schools are not the answer," that to expect schools to address society's ills and then to blame them when they fail is a losing game (but one that we keep on playing).

If you've read this far, you will be disappointed to read that, like everyone else, I have no solution to offer. I believe that human beings are inherently good and creative and generous. I believe that education should not be the province of politicians or businesspersons. I believe that someday enough of us will be right-minded enough to make sure that every student receives a good-enough education. But, for now, too many just suffer.

Accusations of Racism and Waldorf Education

Introduction: Questions of Racism

Waldorf schools have had to contend, especially in the 1990s, with accusations of racism that take two distinct forms. The first is that their principal founder, Rudolf Steiner, expressed racist notions and, therefore, despite whatever other good they may do, schools must disavow these ideas. The second is that schools have, through their curriculum or other institutional practices, expressed racist ideas. In this case, schools should presumably acknowledge their errors and expunge the offending practices or attitudes. This paper is a history of these accusations and of the question of racism in Waldorf education in the United States. It will touch on the accusations of racism against Rudolf Steiner, but a full treatment of this question is beyond the present scope. Further, this paper grew out of research into the history of Waldorf schools that had quite another orientation--the historical promise and equally historical compromises Waldorf schools and teachers have made in finding their way through the 20th century in the United States. Consequently, this is a rough, anecdotal and preliminary investigation of the question it addresses. It contains a small number of stories and observations that I tripped across in the course of other research, and I trust readers to interpret these appropriately. In no way should readers believe I have necessarily seen this situation whole nor addressed its history definitively.

Racisms

The discussions I will examine in constructing this history have generally taken for granted that “racism” has a more or less single objective reality. That is, they have assumed that readers will understand what is meant by racism without examining the concept further, without examining its various complexities and manifestations. I will not attempt to define racism here, but I wish to divide it functionally in four ways before questioning Waldorf education about it. These distinctions are: a. between descriptive and pejorative racism; b. between intentional and naive racism; c. between systemically active and systematically passive racism; and d. between racism generally present in American cultural contexts and racism specific to Waldorf methods, interpretations or representations.

a. The first important distinction exists between what I will call “descriptive” racism and “pejorative” racism. (I have borrowed the terms in quotation marks from Raymond Geuss (1981), whose discussion of the concept of ideology extends easily to a discussion of racism as ideology.) Descriptive racists recognize some historical or biological validity to distinctions of race but do not presume to make claims regarding the superiority or inferiority of any race based on these distinctions. Descriptive racism was certainly the norm until recently, and, technically, is not at all what most people mean when they call someone a racist. Within this strictly technical definition, Steiner was a descriptive racist during the period in which he was a Theosophist, but later moved away from this position.

Some contemporary thinkers see skin color and other indicators of race as existing within a broad plane or spectrum; the distinctions we have labeled “race” in the past are seen to be somewhat arbitrary cultural or political abstractions from a continuum or spectrum of skin colors and physical characteristics. (See Appiah 1992 and Gates 1992) Whether or not this view is supported by genetic or other evidence, time may tell.

Pejorative racists, as the term denotes, recognize distinctions of race--they are, then, a subset of descriptive racists--but claim superiority for one or more races. In common use, “racism” is implicitly pejorative, and anyone today wishing to use concepts of race descriptively will do so in other terms or at her own peril.

b. Racism can further be divided between intentional and naive racism. This distinction is, unfortunately, not as clear as we might wish. Steiner probably intended to be heard as objective, not as a racist, when he spoke, for example, about “blue-eyed, blond haired intelligence,” (March 3, 1923; publication undated) although he plainly did intend to express the concepts contained in his thought, viz., that, in his opinion or experience, the rise or occurance of a particular kind of intelligence was generally associated historically with particular physical characteristics. Without the history of German National Socialism, it’s difficult to know if such a statement would be freighted with such racist overtones today. Regardless, I believe there is a useful conceptual difference between intentional and naive racism, even if the semantics of a given situation can be cloudy.

Further, I am specifically avoiding in this distinction the terms “conscious” and “unconscious,” although they may well apply in these circumstances; it is not my intention to load the discussion with psychological luggage. I am simply interested in knowing so far as possible whether or not someone makes racist claims deliberately.

c. Racism may also be divided between its systematic or institutional appearance and application and its individual appearance. The conventional distinction between institutional and individual racism, however, strikes me as too often convenient and irresponsible, like labored notions of a collective memory or a collective unconscious. There is some validity, however, in the idea that institutions and systems can promote a kind of racism that is different from unintended individual racism. To address this, I will refer to systematically active and systematically passive racism. Passive institutional racism is racism that arises in the wake of the status quo or the promotion of one culture to the unintended detriment of another. Active institutional racism aims to alter the status quo in order to promote the welfare of one race at the expense of another. Again, it is not easy to draw distinctions here, and history may judge an institution differently under different circumstances. Real estate markets, for example, often straddle the line between active and passive racism. Some brokerages intentionally act to further white suburban interests, while others merely passively allow such interests to take precedence.

d. Finally, especially with regard to the history of Waldorf education, we must distinguish the fluid “background” racism of American culture both generally and as it is expressed in Waldorf teachers and schools from “surplus” racism that may result specifically from Waldorf methods or interpretations.

These functions of racism create an oppressive blanket--institutional and individual, deliberate and unwitting, active and passive. Lifting one corner of this blanket will reveal racism at work, but the blanket itself must disappear to see the end of racism. To the extent that Waldorf schools in the United States have woven themselves into the blanket of racism, or found themselves in its threads, they “must take with utmost seriousness every suggestion that [they are] in any way, inadvertently or otherwise, in thrall to attitudes and practices that would hinder [their committment to serving all children],” in the words of Douglas Sloan (1996).

With these distinctions in mind, it is time to address history itself.

Steiner and Racism

Rudolf Steiner was attacked, literally, as an anti-racist by nationalists and anti-Semites during his life. Now, eighty years later, he and the Waldorf schools that espouse his pedagogy have been attacked as racist. How did the same thoughts and statements come to suffer attacks from radically opposed points of view?

1922-1941

In May 1922, the New York Times reported an attack on Steiner, a report that is brief enough to quote in full:

RIOT AT MUNICH LECTURE. Reactionaries Storm Platform When Steiner Discusses Theosophy.

BERLIN, May 16.--Munich enjoyed a riotous demonstration when Germany’s high
priest of Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner, delivered a lecture on ‘Vitalization of
Thought,’ before an audience more than half composed of women. Organized
reactionaries, Nationalists and anti-Semitics [sic] attended the lecture in
force, and toward the end the electric lights were switched off and pandemonium
broke loose. Lighted firecrackers and stink bombs were thrown at the long-haired
Theosophist, and then Steiner’s foes stormed the stage, and a free fight ensued
until police cleared the hall.

Then the demonstrators marched to Railroad Station Square with the intention of hauling down the Republican colors. But these are now taken in at dark and secreted in safe places. The chagrined demonstrators therefore contented themselves with singing the imperialistic “Flag Song” around the flagless flagpoles.

Steiner’s topic that day--“Ways to Know the Spirit in Ancient and Modern Times” (author’s translation; the lecture has been published in German but it has not been translated into English)--was as typical for him as any, and contained nothing that could have provoked the attack. His attackers were protesting Steiner’s public, recognized anti-racist, anti-nationalist positions. Such opposition was not isolated. One German-American with whom I spoke (who does not wish to be identified) attended a debate between Steiner and a German military officer some time in 1919 as a member of a group that intended to heckle and insult Steiner. This man was so impressed by Steiner’s speech and manner, however, that he did not join the protest. On the contrary, he later became interested in anthroposophy, unfortunately, he notes, after Steiner’s death. After moving to the United States in the 1920s, this man became a prominent biodynamic farmer, employing Steiner’s suggestions for the development of healthful agriculture. (Personal communication, March 21, 1998.)

This very early resistance to Steiner’s universalism contradicts the position taken by present Waldorf critic Dan Dugan (1998) who contends that Waldorf schools and anthroposophy were suppressed in Germany only because their racism was of a different stripe than the official Nazi line. In the absence of evidence, this accusation borders on the irrational. While some of Dugan’s criticisms of Waldorf schools are substantial and valid--regarding occasional bad science or history teaching, for example--these are too often lost in a specious and vitriolic haze of rhetoric. During World War II, Waldorf schools were closed by the Nazis, not, as Dugan has claimed, because they offered a racism that competed with the National Socialist view, but because their emphasis on human freedom threatened an authoritarian regime. (See "Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland, Geistige Indiviualitat und Gattungswesen," Sonderheft, Sommer 1995. Referred to in Sloan, D., 1996).

Further, Ida Oberman (1999) makes clear in her dissertation on the history of Waldorf education that schools in Germany employed different strategies and compromised in different ways to remain open as long as possible, but were, in the end, all closed by government order. Some Nazi functionaries--and Waldorf parents--initially saw possibilities for the instrumental use of Waldorf schools to foster Aryan myths, but were disabused of these fantasies by the considered policies and curricula at the schools.

My focus is on Waldorf education in the United States, however, and I leave this topic to others.

Dugan’s interest in Steiner is political, not scholarly. A balanced view of Steiner’s position would not seek, as Dugan does, only to pluck potentially racist statements from an enormous body of work, almost all of which is beyond reproach. On the other hand, it also would not seek, as did several conversations I have had with teachers at Waldorf schools, to blur or paper over disturbing passages. This defensive attitude on the part of some Waldorf teachers and anthroposophists has been noted and rightly criticized by Dugan. The most balanced, scholarly and thorough treatments of Steiner’s position may be found in essays by Douglas Sloan (1996) and Detlef Hardorp (1999). Sloan deals with Steiner’s thought as a whole, however, and does not attempt to refute every claim of racism nor examine every potentially racist statement. Hardorp’s essay examines several potentially offensive passages in Steiner’s work.
Despite questionable passages, however, there can be no clearer statement regarding Steiner’s (1990b) considered views on race than this:

[T]he anthroposophical movement . . . must cast aside the division into races.
It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the
divisions and differences between various groups of people.

Steiner follows this with a disavowal of theosophical talk of “seven races” and “seven sub-races” as an “illness of childhood.” Researchers find theosophical talk of “root races” in Steiner’s work, but must recognize that, as he grew through theosophy to anthroposophy, he changed both his mind and his terms of expression.

Incidentally, the book from which the quotation above is taken, The Universal Human: The Development of the Individual, (1990b) summarizes in its title Steiner’s appeal to “ethical individualism.” Ethical individualism grows from the idea that it is in the exercise of our individuality that we become most universally human; that is, we act ethically when we consciously oppose the drives and desires that seem to us so personal but that do not distinguish us from others in any real way. This succinct idea is itself an anti-racist statement.

1944

Faculty meeting minutes from the Rudolf Steiner School in New York record a first application by a black student on October 11, 1944. The ensuing discussion is illustrative of the contest between imperfect teachers and an ideal they know they should hold. One states firmly that “there is no question of accepting the boy if he’s qualified,” while another wonders if the school isn’t being singled out as a “test case.” The faculty decides to pass the matter before the Board of Trustees before making a final decision, recognizing the potential economic consequences. Unfortunately, future minutes do not record whether or not the applicant was admitted.

Of equal importance to the question of the admission of the black applicant was a corollary discussion in which it was recorded that the school had an “unwritten rule” that no class would be constituted of more than one-fourth Jewish children. The minutes make clear that this rule was not referred to when a particular trustee, who was Jewish, was present. Further research may establish whether or not this policy was ever enforced, although its very existence argues that the question was raised at least once. Given the influx of Jewish refugees before and during World War II, and given the Steiner School’s particular and contested interpretation of itself as a “Christian” school, we can comprehend the perceived cultural threat while deploring the policy.

In all, the discussion in the minutes, despite a suspicious teacher or two, strikes a contemporary reader as relatively enlightened, coming as it did in the year of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944/1996), a discussion of “the Negro problem” in the United States and almost a decade before the Civil Rights movement really started to move. In the case of this discussion, it may be said, Steiner's ideas provide a scaffold useful for promoting an anti-racist act: the potential admission of a black student. And when a racist policy--a quota on Jews--is discussed, it is not justified with recourse to Steiner's ideas. In 1944, among one small American school faculty, it is clear that Steiner is still considered an anti-racist.

1970-1990

For years The Waldorf School of Garden City had an all white faculty and an all or mostly black custodial staff. One sees here passive racism at work; without intent, the broad economic system of suburban Long Island--white white-collar workers supported by minority blue-collar workers--had been replicated within the school, a school that, had it been asked, would have promoted itself as anti-racist.

Similarly, because most of the teachers at the school were Christian and because anthroposophy is too often spoken of thoughtlessly as “Christian,” festivals and assemblies had a Protestant Christian flavor, not noticed by Christians themselves, who may well have thought they were “toning things down” for public consumption, but very evident and occasionally upsetting to Jewish families with whom I spoke.

According to one credible account, a candidate for a high school teaching job at The Waldorf School of Garden City in 1979 was asked by a high-level administrator who was interviewing alone, "What is your surname?" When the candidate, who is Jewish and who now sends children to a Waldorf school, answered with a name typically taken to be Jewish, the administrator continued, "Please get on your knees." The candidate, naive, eager to please, and sincerely interested in the esoteric basis of Waldorf education, did so, not knowing what to expect. "To teach here, you must accept Jesus as your savior," the administrator allegedly said. The candidate ended the interview on the spot and ran down the hall. Jewish anthroposophists reassured the candidate later that such statements reflected a relatively unique point of view, and were not generally taken to be true or appropriate.

In the late 1980s some members of the faculty at The Waldorf School of Garden City voiced concerns regarding a growing population of African (and Caribbean) Americans in the school. The discussion was not overtly racist, but concerned whether or not the school might eventually become a predominantly black school; the problem foreseen was not a problem of black culture, if such a construct exists outside white imagination, but of the continued economic viability of the school. This point of view is a mirror image of the white fear that a black neighbor in the suburbs will drive down property values. That is, it was both an economic possibility--although how real may be open to question--and a moral failing. For whites, Adam Smith’s invisible hand is often white.

Similarly, while the school did not set out to teach a "white" education, several African-American students with whom I spoke felt the marked absence of “their” culture. None wished to speak for attribution. "It was so clear. White music with a few black spirituals. No black heroes except in February. No African-American folktales," said one graduate of the school from the 1980s, someone who values the school and dreams of starting a scholarship fund at the school for children of color.

In a North American survey (undated), completed in 1994, dividing results between favorable and unfavorable narrative responses, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) lists a ratio of 27:17, favorable to unfavorable, with regard to questions of “understanding/appreciation of other individuals/cultures.” Responses from the Garden City school show the greatest variation, but it should be noted that this school, with few exceptions, has had the largest minority population of most established Waldorf schools and of almost all with high schools for decades. At a gathering of 12th grades from various eastern Waldorf high schools in 1991, of the half-dozen students of color, only one--from Washington, D.C.--was not from The Waldorf School of Garden City.

1992-The Present

I can find no discussion of racism in published discussions of Waldorf education prior to 1992, when the question arose following a Dutch investigation of possible racism in the teachings of some Dutch Waldorf schools. (See McDermott 1996) The Dutch schools, followed quickly by others worldwide, quickly disavowed racism and, by default, any possible racist statements of Rudolf Steiner’s. As de Volkskrant notes (McDermott 1996), the furor in Holland was over a course in ethnography, added to the curriculum in Holland and, so far as I can determine, not taught in the United States, although even here some teachers have mentioned others who have transgressed some line of conscience in presenting racial stereotypes. Like cannibalism, however, always attributed to neighboring tribes, I spoke with no teacher who actually taught racial stereotypes or expressed less than a politically correct position on the matter.

The rottenness in Holland coincided more or less with the introduction of Waldorf educational methods into some U.S. public schools, beginning with the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, a “choice” school within Milwaukee public school system. (99% of the students and about half the teachers at this school are African American.) In light of the news from Holland and the recent introduction of Waldorf methods into some public schools, Ray McDermott of Stanford University followed an evaluative visit to the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School with an article in the Waldorf Education Research Institute’s Research Bulletin, in which he commended Waldorf schools for their “quick response” to the issue, typified by a letter from David Alsop, Chairman of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:

We have resolved to take an honest and penetrating look at ourselves and our schools to see if indeed racist attitudes and behavior exist, and to make every effort to change if this is the case. (8 October 1995)

Another Opinion

I asked Charlotte Colbert, principal of the Urban Waldorf School about eurocentrism or racism in the Waldorf curriculum. "I don't know where Steiner got them," she said, "but music, dance, movement, storytelling, these are African traditions." (Personal communication, February 21, 2001)

These notes in the history of Waldorf education might end here, but for the Waldorf critic Dan Dugan, parent of a former student at the San Francisco Waldorf School and that contradiction, a devout skeptic. Dugan posted translations of several Dutch articles relating to the stew there, included McDermott’s essay, and threw in a vituperative press release he had written himself regarding the tragic story of a disturbed son of two Waldorf teachers who killed a policeman and then shot himself. (1998) In his press release, “Denver Skinhead’s Family Professed Sophisticated Version of Aryan Superiority Myth,” Dugan writes,

Anthroposophists insist that they are not racists, and there is no reason to
doubt their sincerity. They just don’t understand that Steiner’s mythical
history was old-fashioned in his own time and is ridiculously ignorant in
ours.

Steiner was clear, however, that the material of anthroposophy, some of it esoteric “mythical history,” was not fit for nor intended to inform Waldorf schools or the education of children. To the extent that some school teachers attempt to translate complex esoterica for school children, they are clearly wrong-headed. For Dugan, who clearly sees Waldorf schools as part of cult conspiracy, to single out examples of ignorance among Waldorf teachers as evidence for the failure of a method of education, however, is equally wrong-headed.

Steiner’s View?

Steiner’s view on race evolved from his early theosophical writings to his later anthroposophical writings; nonetheless, Steiner may accurately be called a descriptive racist, with the strange caveat that, according to his evolutionary view, race itself is a vestige of an earlier time. (I have no room nor inclination here to summarize Steiner’s claims nor the process by which he arrives at these claims.)

Dan Dugan is also a founding member of PLANS (People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools), an organization that has brought lawsuits against California Charter Waldorf schools in the Sacramento and Twin Ridges districts. (Cases dismissed 2001) The basis for these suits was violation of the “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. According to Dugan, at least one of the schools has admitted that anthroposophy is a religion (shooting themselves in the foot, it seems. Plenty of people argue successfully that it is not.

Dugan’s arguments, and the discussion regarding separation of church and state, are remarkably semantic. Any belief other than a sincere belief in skepticism (true skeptics must be skeptical even of their own skepticism, a humble and uncommon position), it seems, may be challenged or promoted as a religion in this New Age. On the other side, Steiner made it clear any number of times that anthroposophy was not intended to be a set of beliefs, but a method for learning to know the world. Again, to the extent that Dugan singles out individual ignorance as evidence of a rotten system, his logic if faulty. And to the extent that some ignorant Waldorf teachers don’t understand the method they espouse, their platform is shaky. In the end, of course, we are all in the same boat with regard to these questions. No one can claim a perfect understanding of anthroposophy, and in its broadest form, some of the wisdom of humanity embraces even those who eschew its sectarian forms and its apparently untestable hypotheses.

Conclusion

Dan Dugan’s hold on the imagination of Waldorf schools and teachers is due largely to our legalistic culture and to the power of the Internet, which allows everyone to become his own publisher.

The present discussion, as a discussion of who is included and who excluded by a particular culture, can also inform discussions of religion--especially Christianity--anti-Semitism, Eurocentrism, and anthroposophical dogma in Waldorf schools. As a model for each of these discussions, I believe my tentative conclusions stand. That is, while some Waldorf teachers may be dogmatic, anti-Semitic or Eurocentric, for example, these failings are failings of their culture, their interpretations of Steiner’s work, and, most important, of their imaginations. Anthroposophy, the wisdom of humanity, surely allows no less. Further, the history of an idea often involves the sclerosis of certain concepts connected with it as they embed themselves further and further in the institutional culture that surrounds them. Waldorf schools are remarkable places, but places inextricably bound to the discourse on race in the United States, whether they acknowledge this or not.

References

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Dugan, D. (1999). http://www.dandugan.com/waldorf/index.html#Articles
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