The Recovery of Man in Childhood, the first comprehensive attempt to summarize Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for English speakers, enjoys the advantage of the first-born; it has no one to refute or imitate. The book, consequently, is a straightforward account that begins, after two thoughtful introductory chapters, with early childhood and ends, abruptly, with the curriculum of the twelfth grade. Harwood was English. His book was published first in England but was imported immediately to the United States. The Myrin Institute, then in New York City, supported Harwood in writing the book, and the Institute then held the copyright. The book is dedicated, in fact, “to my very good friend H. A. W. M.,” that is, to Alarik Myrin. Mr. Myrin, a Swedish-born American industrialist, aided the founding of two Waldorf schools in the United States, the Waldorf School of Adelphi College (later of Garden City), NY, and the Kimberton Farms School, PA. (See Winkler 1970.)
With Francis Edmunds, Stewart Easton and others, Harwood represents a broad generation of English and Scottish Waldorf teachers and anthroposophists who lectured, taught and even settled in the U.S. With a contemporaneous group of mostly German speakers, they helped to transplant Steiner’s ideas to the U.S. A corollary group of Americans, including Henry Barnes, long-time Faculty Chair at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, traveled to England, Germany and Switzerland to pursue an understanding of Steiner’s work.
Separate from references to a somewhat more British than American sensibility, somewhat archaic language, and the general presumption that his audience is Christian, Harwood’s book is relatively more free from historical consideration than are the other books I examine below. That is to say, it speaks more directly to longer-term questions of education and less to existing cultural or political contexts. Again, this is due in part to its status as first in the field; following authors, although they do not necessarily acknowledge Harwood, are certainly aware of his work and must carve out a separate niche for themselves.
On the other hand, Harwood’s central aim, the “marriage of the Arts and Sciences, a marriage in the core of their being, based on the ultimate unity of human experience…” (11) echoes an educational debate of the 1950s, at least, as it also reflects a longer-term Romantic interest in similar questions (see Barfield 1966). This post-war debate has recently been characterized, for example, briefly, well, and somewhat controversially, by Alston Chase (2000) with regard to Ted Kaszinski’s (the Unabomber’s) Harvard education, and education in Chase’s view that sought to sunder the search for meaning from scientific truth.
As a summary of longer works by Rudolf Steiner and of long personal experience, Harwood’s descriptions often threaten to collapse into stereotypes. Here Americans may read a British mind: “The inwardness of the girls [in adolescence] may easily degenerate into the horrors of backbiting and spitefulness; the externalism of the boys into the frightfulness of bullying and organized cruelty.” (173) True, perhaps, but easier to imagine there and then. Each teacher and each generation must recast conceptions of, for example, adolescence, if it is not to miss situational and cultural changes.
Steiner was a Christian who, seemingly, embraced all religions. Too often, his followers have been unable to maintain his distinction between Christianity as a collection of organized sects and Christianity as, in part, an inclusive, compassionate attitude of mind. Harwood’s writing is scarcely objectionable, but assumes his reader to be almost certainly a Christian. The last sentences of the book provide an example. “The body is a House and a Temple, and it is the source and fountain of all forms and proportions. It is a secret known to the Christian religion in especial. To live in the body as in a Temple—this is the ultimate gift with which a Waldorf School would wish to send its children into the world.” (208) (Perhaps taken with the German origins of their studies, many writers in English on Waldorf education adopt a style that involves more capitalization than is necessary.) Why Greeks or Jews, for example, have less claim than Christians to this idea is unclear. The Recovery of Man in Childhood, the first comprehensive attempt to summarize Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for English speakers, enjoys the advantage of the first-born; it has no one to refute or imitate. The book, consequently, is a straightforward account that begins, after two thoughtful introductory chapters, with early childhood and ends, abruptly, with the curriculum of the twelfth grade. Harwood was English. His book was published first in England but was imported immediately to the United States. The Myrin Institute, then in New York City, supported Myrin in writing the book, and the Institute then held the copyright. The book is dedicated, in fact, “to my very good friend H. A. W. M.,” that is, to Alarik Myrin. Mr. Myrin, a Swedish-born American industrialist, aided the founding of two Waldorf schools in the United States, the Waldorf School of Adelphi College (later of Garden City), NY, and the Kimberton Farms School, PA. (See Winkler 1970.)
With Francis Edmunds, Stewart Easton and others, Harwood represents a broad generation of English and Scottish Waldorf teachers and anthroposophists who lectured, taught and even settled in the U.S. With a contemporaneous group of mostly German speakers, they helped to transplant Steiner’s ideas to the U.S. A corollary group of Americans, including Henry Barnes, long-time Faculty Chair at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, traveled to England, Germany and Switzerland to pursue an understanding of Steiner’s work.
Separate from references to a somewhat more British than American sensibility, somewhat archaic language, and the general presumption that his audience is Christian, Harwood’s book is relatively more free from historical consideration than are the other books I examine below. That is to say, it speaks more directly to longer-term questions of education and less to existing cultural or political contexts. Again, this is due in part to its status as first in the field; following authors, although they do not necessarily acknowledge Harwood, are certainly aware of his work and must carve out a separate niche for themselves.
On the other hand, Harwood’s central aim, the “marriage of the Arts and Sciences, a marriage in the core of their being, based on the ultimate unity of human experience…” (11) echoes an educational debate of the 1950s, at least, as it also reflects a longer-term Romantic interest in similar questions (see Barfield 1966). This post-war debate has recently been characterized, for example, briefly, well, and somewhat controversially, by Alston Chase (2000) with regard to Ted Kaszinski’s (the Unabomber’s) Harvard education, and education in Chase’s view that sought to sunder the search for meaning from scientific truth.
As a summary of longer works by Rudolf Steiner and of long personal experience, Harwood’s descriptions often threaten to collapse into stereotypes. Here Americans may read a British mind: “The inwardness of the girls [in adolescence] may easily degenerate into the horrors of backbiting and spitefulness; the externalism of the boys into the frightfulness of bullying and organized cruelty.” (173) True, perhaps, but easier to imagine there and then. Each teacher and each generation must recast conceptions of, for example, adolescence, if it is not to miss situational and cultural changes.
Steiner was a Christian who, seemingly, embraced all religions. Too often, his followers have been unable to maintain his distinction between Christianity as a collection of organized sects and Christianity as, in part, an inclusive, compassionate attitude of mind. Harwood’s writing is scarcely objectionable, but assumes his reader to be almost certainly a Christian. The last sentences of the book provide an example. “The body is a House and a Temple, and it is the source and fountain of all forms and proportions. It is a secret known to the Christian religion in especial. To live in the body as in a Temple—this is the ultimate gift with which a Waldorf School would wish to send its children into the world.” (208) (Perhaps taken with the German origins of their studies, many writers in English on Waldorf education adopt a style that involves more capitalization than is necessary.) Why Greeks or Jews, for example, have less claim than Christians to this idea is unclear.
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