A fifth book, Ida Oberman’s fascinating and much-needed historical study of Waldorf education in Germany and the United States, Fidelity and Flexibility in Waldorf Education, 1919-1998, supports my division of the history of Waldorf schools into generations, representing three of them in its third section. Oberman’s book is divided into three sections. The first examines the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart from its founding until Rudolf Steiner’s death in 1925. The second examines the course of Waldorf education in Germany after Steiner’s death and during the rise and reign of the Nazis. The third traces the transplantation of Waldorf education to the United States.
The first section locates the origin of the first Waldorf school in Steiner’s intellectual biography. From his interests in Goethe and theosophy, through the founding of the Anthroposophical Society to the threefold social movement, Oberman details the bases for a curriculum based in German cultural history, school administration independent of the state (“free” schooling), and the idea of schooling as social transformation. By anchoring the founding of the first school in the realities of Steiner’s life and the social and political life of Germany after World War I, Oberman provides perspective on what otherwise can seem like a Waldorf decalogue, handed down once and for all time without apparent compromise or context. To add to the context or “cultural field” described by Oberman, as Nancy Parsons Whittaker has suggested, the curriculum of the first school, for example, was also constrained by state requirements and by the strengths and weaknesses of those whom Steiner recommended to teach.
In the second section, Oberman locates a structure for understanding the history of the spread of Waldorf schools in the actions and reactions of anthroposophists and Waldorf teachers upon Steiner’s death. Some, like Marie Steiner, strove to preserve in purity their understanding of Steiner’s wishes. Others, like Hermann von Baravalle, sought to accommodate their understanding of Waldorf education and anthroposophy to their understanding of their audience. And still others, like Ita Wegman, tried to further an understanding of Steiner’s indications through a process of evolution.
Oberman then examines the activity of German Waldorf schools during the rise to power of the Nazis. Her findings, carefully and sensitively presented, should really be no surprise. Too often we forget the ease with which we read history backwards, knowing the results, forgetting that this is a luxury denied to those who lived through it. That some parents and Waldorf teachers saw parallels between Nazi ideology and the German culture as presented in the Waldorf curriculum should not surprise us. Neither should the fact that some teachers argued for making compromises with the state in order to keep schools open as long as possible. Nor should the subtle resistance of Waldorf teachers who discovered a radio “broken” just at the time students were required to listen to a broadcast by Hitler. Nor should Oberman’s description of Hitler’s picture (display required by law) side by side with Steiner’s on a school wall. These details and many others provide a vivid picture of teachers, parents and students living through turmoil central to the twentieth century.
Turning her attention to the United States, Oberman finds the strategies or modes of operation that arose following Steiner’s death—purity, accommodation, and evolution—in U.S. Waldorf schools. She describes the first school, the Rudolf Steiner School of New York City, as one that pursued a “quest for purity” by hiring a number of native German speakers familiar with Waldorf education and by hewing close to the curriculum of the original school in Stuttgart. Further, with the closing of Waldorf schools in Germany, Oberman describes the New York school as assuming the mantle of leadership among Waldorf schools. Whether or not other schools internationally accepted this decision—or even knew of it—is another matter. Oberman’s description of the New York school as one seeking purity is generally accurate, I believe. Curative or therapeutic eurythmy was called “Heil” eurythmy throughout the 1930s, and the school reported annually not only to “Headquarters” (the New York City Anthroposophical branch office) but also to Stuttgart. On the other hand, for example, Baravalle, Oberman’s accommodationist, lectured to the faculty and community frequently, and was offered the position of Director of the school in the late 1930s. He refused, for reasons of his own. Faculty meeting minutes also reveal that a debate occurred as to whether or not it was appropriate for teachers in American Waldorf schools to have German (or other) accents. Such examples are numerous. Purity, to the extent it was sought by the New York school, was not sought uncontested.
Oberman describes the constellation of people around the founding of the Kimberton, PA, school, von Baravalle and Alarik Myrin chief among them, as a group that sought to minimize the anthroposophical ground from which Waldorf education grew. Here again, Oberman is largely correct, I believe. I have greater familiarity with the Garden City, NY, school, Myrin’s second school, and the history of this school also speaks to an attempt to accommodate what the founders saw as a more pragmatic American attitude, one that had little interest in promoting anthroposophy to parents or a larger community. (Rather, especially through the Myrin Institute for Adult Education, they sought to promote fruitful ideas that were often but not always grounded in anthroposophy without discussing anthroposophy itself publicly.) Von Baravalle and Elizabeth Grunelius, both teachers in the first school in Stuttgart, were present in the very early years of the Garden City school but soon left the school to the Americans.
Taken together, and given the long term success—relatively equal among the schools Oberman studied—what are we to make of these differences? Is there room for each, or is one strategy better or more successful by some criteria? I would say that there has been a gradual blending over the years, and that it would be extremely difficult for an outside observer today to distinguish these separate paths to the present from present conditions. Purity is necessarily tainted by seventy years past. Accommodationists have relaxed their stance, on the one hand, and, on the other, everyone else has pursued certain necessary accommodations. Schools have made significant efforts to include their—unfortunately generally small--African American or Jewish populations, for example. We are all, perhaps, evolutionists now. (The argument might be made that, in Oberman’s terms, purity and accommodation are two poles between which evolutionists live.)
Despite my admiration for and agreement with most of what Oberman writes, I must take exception to two particulars. The first is her use of the unqualified “Waldorf” to mean Waldorf education, ideology, and reform. It is a convenient shorthand, as in the phrases, “how Waldorf followers use the past in their present,” or “the history of Waldorf in America.” On the other hand, it reifies and objectifies a form of education that only gradually came to be so calcified after seventy or more years of history. It is an ahistorical weakness, then, that the carreful reader must guard against, especially, for example, when it is inserted unwarranted into a quotation from Emil Molt and Fritz von Bothmer: “The faculty now active at this school have proven... their willingness to continue this [Waldorf] work...” That they did not call it “Waldorf” work is a historical fact, indicative of a less exclusive point of view that deserves greater recognition.
Second, Oberman represents Waldorf education, primarily through its schools, as an “ideology” and a “German reform.” Further, Oberman refers to Steiner’s “target group,” for example, and to Waldorf education’s “theater of expansion.” No doubt historical actors have treated Waldorf education as an ideology operating to reform in a theater of expansion. One should also include, however, consideration for the ways in which Waldorf education strives not to be ideological and does not necessarily represent a German reform, or a “reform” of any but the most expansive, inclusive kind. Reform implies an activist agenda, and plenty of Waldorf teachers have been and are activists. An understanding of freedom or of Waldorf education, however, does not particularly support—or deny support for--any but the most personally transformative activism. And from another point of view Waldorf schools have resisted expansion, cloistering themselves, spending most of a century perfecting an exclusive jargon. This is part of their history, too.
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