The Experience of Knowledge is a collection of John Gardner’s essays, written over his twenty-five year tenure as Faculty Chairman of the Waldorf School of Garden City (originally the Waldorf School of Adelphi College, an experimental school started largely at the behest of Adelphi trustee Alarik Myrin; it obtained autonomy from Adelphi in 1973 and incorporated a board of trustees in 1979). The book is organized in three parts. The first contains Gardner’s earlier, grandly philosophical essays on education. An example is “What is Man?” an essay that argues that human beings are more than “organisms,” despite the reductive conclusions of John Dewey, Gestalt psychologists, and, especially, a now forgotten book, Education and the Nature of Man. Gardner’s central point is that self-knowledge, the springboard for any claims about the organismic (or other) nature of man, transcends necessarily the level of the organism alone. It necessitates recognition of an ego, and, hence, a moral stance. (Ego, self, or “I” are “das Ich” in Steiner’s German, not “das Ego,” and denote a concept difficult to translate. Steiner’s notion of self implies a sort of essential and continuing individuality without the abstract connotations of a “thing” that cannot be divided; a self without necessarily implying selfishness or a changeable personality; and an ego in a sense not freighted with Freudian or other psychoanalytic overtones. Some English authors have translated the concept as the “I,” which works in print but is monumentally confusing when spoken because of the homonym “eye”.) Gardner’s argument here mirrors Steiner’s discussion of “ethical individualism” (Steiner 1970) in seeing individualism not as a reduction from a social whole nor as a manifestation of selfishness, but as the possibility of moral choice, choice that might in fact contradict the impositions of “natural” drives and desires.
Part Two of Gardner’s book addresses educational questions of intellect, truth, knowledge, experience and morality. Unlike other essays, in which the philosophical discussion resists touching the ground, Gardner aims here to use the methods of education found in Waldorf schools to illustrate his points. He shows how truth, conceptualized in maturity as intellectual or logical truth, grows first through the activity—especially physical activity—of very young children, and then through the feelings and imaginations of elementary school-age children. Without experiences of truth as action and a feeling for truth, Gardner argues, we will be unlikely as adults to recognize it even intellectually. This three stage description, based on Steiner’s work and Gardner’s observations, finds a clear parallel, for example, in Piaget’s stages of the development of reasoning, his study of genetic epistemology. The term “sensori-motor” accords well with the experience of physical activity that Gardner describes, and Piaget’s stage of “concrete operations” also parallels the manipulation of artistic materials that Waldorf teachers find so valuable in the elementary school. On the other hand, while Piaget was an exacting researcher, his narrow focus neglects, perhaps, the value of behavior and affect, in order to favor the development of cognition. It is worth noting that some American educators have attached ages to Piaget’s stages, something that he himself resisted (see, for example, Crain 1992, pp. 122-134, and Piaget 1965). That is, we could say that Piaget was interested in a precise description of the development of thinking while some later authors have been interested in an educational application, for example. These latter have therefore quantified and simplified Piaget’s work unnecessarily. That Steiner’s rough seven year periods of development do not accord exactly with Piaget’s descriptions hardly matters; the point is that both are describing similar developmental processes, processes that are cumulative and metamorphic. That is, development for both Steiner and Piaget involves “sea changes,” not ladder-like accumulations or accretions.
The title essay of Gardner’s book resides in this central section, and it offers Gardner’s only introduction to the educational methods of Waldorf schools. Gardner emphasizes, for example, “the cognitive power that lies hidden in feeling and will.” (66) He discovers in the cognitive act of learning to read, for example, the necessity for “a vivid experience of the creative, formative powers that lie within language.” (67) We might say that the method used to teach reading hardly matters (whole language v. phonics, eg.) if a child’s imagination and interest are not engaged. (While this reads like a truism, the sterility of “Dick and Jane” readers points to its neglect, at least earlier in the century.)
For a historical consideration of Gardner’s book, the third part is the most instructive. The essays here are mature reflections of “problems of special interest to parents and citizens.” (v) They hew closely to accepted broad principles of Waldorf education in that they are concerned with inspiring genius, developing the possibility of individual freedom, and separating schools from government control as goals for education. They also reflect, however, particularly and often deliberately, concerns of many Americans who perceived political and cultural threats to democracy, individualism and freedom, however conceived, during the Cold War. That is, they stand in clear opposition to, at least, stereotypical conceptions of the threats of Marxist-Leninist socialism: political totalitarianism, cultural indoctrination, and economic communism. Gardner’s arguments are not arguments from the right, however, at least not in the conventional sense. They recognize, for example, that philosophical materialism may underlie both capitalism and communism, and that the Soviet Union and China are not the only nations that might seek to indoctrinate rather than educate their students. In this sense, Gardner’s arguments aim to transcend the Cold War deadlock, while acknowledging it as the foundation of a discourse. In this aim it is surprisingly similar, for example, to that of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. Both Gardner and Solzhenitsyn see a solution to the political and economic standoff of the times in individual transformation. To update their concerns, the world may cheer the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the apparent tensions remain between social responsibility and individual freedom and between reductive materialism and a qualitative, synthetic understanding of the world.
If Gardner’s arguments ring of Emersonian transcendentalism it is no accident. Gardner taught Transcendentalist literature for years, published several lectures on Transcendental writers, and clearly strove, within the form of the essay, for an Emersonian economy of words. His success in this regard was not complete, not that it could be. The essay titled “Authority, Discipline, and Freedom”—here are at least three essays for Emerson, had he wished to tackle subjects so abstract—begins, “Those who dispute about how to educate free men argue the effects of childish obedience upon adult self-reliance, of unquestioning trust and belief in authority during the first school years upon the critical thinking that enables a mature individual later on to steer his way past illusion.” (117) Emerson’s vocabulary and locutions aside, Gardner sets up a debate between Cold War straw men and proceeds to demonstrate how each is only partially correct (and neither is mutually exclusive). Such rhetoric falls short of Emerson’s direct and pithy expression.
On the other hand, in his interest in Emerson—three of ten essays begin by quoting Emerson—Gardner forwards a previous theme of my research, the notion that Waldorf education, taken not as an object but as an expression of a method, derives from influences that predate Steiner. Chief among them for Americans is Emerson.
A second edition of Gardner’s book was published in 1996 under the title Education in Search of Spirit. Despite a note that the new edition has been “revised, updated and expanded,” there are few changes. Some of these few changes, however, are noteworthy. In “Morality and the Experience of Knowledge,” for example, Gardner originally wrote, “The self will out [of its solitary confinement]. Drugs, sex, speed, civil disobedience, and revolution seem to offer ways out; but the trouble with all of them is that their ways are illusory.” (97) In 1996, the same passage reads, “Drugs, sex, speed, and rebellion seem to offer ways out…” (111) Despite similarities, it is easy to read a polemic against the civil unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the first quotation and to catch a recognition of the possible virtues of civil disobedience and revolution in the second. The drama of the times is tempered in retrospect.
In a discussion of “the path of redemption [following the] Fall of Man,” the second edition inserts the phrase, “…whose time must come and has come, if the Fall is not to be final.” (173) Coupled with the addition of the following tortured, pessimistic observation, we read, it seems, the personality change of the author, from active teacher to passive observer:
As the Western world feels the helplessness of its own predominantly material, technological, economic orientation to master soul sickness and social distemper as these are appearing in depression, addictions, criminality, the dissolving of moral values, and the whole tide of destructive behavior afflicting millions of the younger generation—what is to prevent us from being drawn quite out of our orbit?(170)
The foreword to the second edition suggests that, even in Waldorf schools, head and hands suffer the neglect of heart. To remedy this perceived lack, Gardner suggests what he calls the “direct approach” to the spirit (or Spirit; several words are apocalyptically capitalized in the second edition), “intensified wonder, delight, and grateful praise… only spirit finds spirit. … Only the real Self can answer: ‘I truly want…’ ” (14-15) These concepts, that suffer by comparison with the relative clarity of Gardner’s earlier writing, I believe, accord more with Gardner’s late interest in “charismatic Christianity” than they do with Steiner’s work (see Gardner 1992). [N.B.: Some “anthroposophical” literature finds its way to print through vanity presses. Readers unable to locate some of these more obscure volumes to which I refere are directed to the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, NY, a friendly and reliable source.]
In his interests in transcendentalism, the Cold War, and, later, fundamentalist Christianity, Gardner reflects concerns that accord well with the generation of Waldorf schools that I call the American.
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