What Makes Waldorf, Waldorf?

What is essential to the practices and understandings of Waldorf schools and Waldorf school teachers? If Rudolf Steiner’s work on teaching and learning is not to be seen partially, inaccurately, or superficially, how can it be seen?

In writing previously that “there is no such thing as Waldorf education” (“No Such Thing,” Research Bulletin, Vol. VIII, no. 1) I was alluding to Donald Winnicott’s famous statement that there is “no such thing as a baby,”[1] which has been followed through decades by other healthy attempts to overcome the fragmenting, objectifying tendencies of our modern minds. Winnicott was at pains to show, in England after World War II, that a child alone—without a mother, at least (or, to use more contemporary language, a caregiver)—cannot survive. His research into the necessary, life-giving, and life-sustaining relationship of child and parent added significantly to what we know about children and childhood. Clearly, he was not actually denying the existence of children in any but a rhetorical sense. In fact, he devoted much of his life and career to them.

I stand by my statements about Waldorf education and the context in which we necessarily understand it. To try to see Waldorf education as a thing-in-itself is necessarily to see it partially and inaccurately. To believe in things as entities separate from context and the rest of creation is to participate in exactly the fragmenting, objectifying consciousness against which Waldorf teachers wish to stand. Further, to identify Waldorf education by its trappings, practices, or functions is to see it only superficially. (See “Playing ‘Steiner Says,’” Research Bulletin, Vol. XII, no. 2.)

So, can we see Waldorf education whole, and, if so, how?

The Checklist Test

We could begin by creating a checklist of all the things Steiner said about teaching and learning. I suggest this as a thought experiment only, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I hope not to see a future publication entitled, The Waldorf Teacher’s Checklist of Everything Rudolf Steiner Had to Say about Teaching and Learning. The list would include items that deal with the mundane, the sublime, and everything in between—discipline and math teaching, destiny and temperament. If we create and examine such a list, I believe, we recognize that we are babes in the woods when it comes to actually doing Waldorf education. We are generally not seers. Our spiritual development may be strong in many ways but it is infantile in others.

It may be many years, many generations, before we can begin to approach Steiner as an equal and do more than begin to implement education the way he envisaged it. By way of analogy, consider Aristotle’s work on gravity. This was accepted, unquestioned, for nearly 2000 years, until Galileo, avatar of a consciousness beyond Aristotle’s, was able to meet gravity on new terms and demonstrate ways in which Aristotle’s thinking was incorrect. Who today can do the same for Steiner? More important, who today can equal or even approach Steiner in insight and understanding?

Which items on our list are essential and which may be altered or dispensed with? Our rudimentary understanding of Waldorf education may fail us. One item looks much like another. How else may we proceed?


The Tin Shack Test

Another thought experiment by which to test what is essential in Steiner’s view of teaching and learning is what I call the Tin Shack Test. Clearly, Waldorf education is compromised if it exists solely for the benefit of the few wealthy families that can afford private school tuition. It must be possible to practice education in a fruitful and health-giving way even if our school building is a tin shack and we have no money for supplies. Any quality or characteristic or practice of teaching and learning that cannot find itself in the tin shack—or the shade of a tree, for example—is probably not essential.

By “wealthy,” I should say, I mean almost all of us. Half the world lives on the equivalent of a dollar or two per day. Those of us fortunate enough to have hot and cold running water, a refrigerator, and an automobile should consider ourselves to be among the wealthiest persons ever to walk the planet—in the ancient world, the number of servants or slaves necessary to maintain us in such luxury would have been in the hundreds.

The Essence of Essence

The word that Steiner most frequently used to describe what I am talking about is the German noun Wesen, which translates as “being,” as in “human being.” The German is less concrete than its English counterpart, however, and may also be translated as “nature,” as in Socrates’ “medicine has to define the nature of the body.” And it may further be translated as “essence,” as in Zoolander’s “moisture is the essence of wetness.” When Steiner uses the word Wesen, we mistake ourselves in English if our minds leap to a concept of corporeality, too often associated in English with the word “being.” The essence of being, we may say, is of an immaterial nature.

I am aware, however, of a large literature that limns the dangers of thinking that approaches essentials, giving rise to a new form of prejudice, “essentialism.”[2] I take the central argument here to be that so often in history what we have believed contained some essential quality—whiteness or maleness, for example—turned out later on or on careful inspection not to. Much of the world that seems so given and so real is, in fact, contingent, or at least created, situational, and symbolic and is likely to change from time to time and context to context. So we must approach “Waldorfness” with great care, ready to find that it’s not what we thought it was and may not be anything at all.

As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, however, and as so many have quoted, we can distinguish in the mind what we cannot divide in the world.[3] My aim here is to distinguish what for Waldorf teachers is central to their understanding of what we do, recognizing that this may change over time or with changing contexts. I am not burrowing into the center of a planet to find its core; I am examining a box of artifacts, if you will, to discover—in my estimation—those that better reveal the unique qualities of the person to whom it belongs.

Imagining the Best

What, then, is essential to teaching and learning according to Steiner’s work, according to his images of human beings and the world? One method for approaching the question of the core of what we call Waldorf education is to imagine what we could not do without, in a broad and durable sense. Which aspects of our work, if we were forbidden to implement them, might lead us to close our doors or declare that we could no longer call ourselves Waldorf teachers or a Waldorf school?

I will posit, hesitantly, that there are five categories, each of which is taken to be essential to what we do in Waldorf schools. Readers will note that any teacher, any school, could adopt these practices and understandings. I will let others determine at what point, level, or degree of commitment a person becomes a Waldorf teacher, a school becomes a Waldorf school. My own view is that anyone courageous enough to want to work with Steiner’s ideas on education deserves our support and admiration, regardless of setting or circumstance.

I say hesitantly because I may well have the number wrong. Biologists who count species, for example, may be termed lumpers—those who overlook minor differences in favor of underlying sameness—or splitters—those who see relatively minor differences as significant. I attempt neither a lumper nor a splitter to be, but I acknowledge that I may be overlooking something important, a sixth or seventh essential, or I may be including too many, separating characteristics that would better be combined. I welcome correction.

Fortunately, these five aspects of education may be seen as facets of one encompassing whole. While the myths of Waldorf education multiply beyond counting, the essentials tend toward one. I end by considering characteristics of this whole.

Five Gifts

One way to picture the five essentials is as gifts that Waldorf school teachers give their graduates, and by this I mean primarily high school graduates. Lower school parents and graduates will recognize these gifts, but they will also recognize that none comes fully to fruition by the end of eighth grade.

1. Ideas and Ideals

The first gift is a source of ideas and ideals. Waldorf education does not provide beliefs, ideology, culture, or worldview, although it necessarily manifests a collection of cultures and can devolve into ideology. (The “Waldorf worldview,” at least in its mundane expression, is an expression of time and place, and is not essential. Countercultural or alternative education only came into being in the 1960s, for example.) Belief, knowledge, and worldview may be “about” spiritual matters, but they should not be mistaken for them. An intellectual understanding of Waldorf education does not make a teacher, and highly gifted teachers may be poor at discussing what they do and how they do it.

What teachers provide, more important than any knowledge about a way of life or a worldview, is a pathway or method for discovering these ideas and ideals, should a student wish later in life to pursue them. Choosing this path, following it, and putting into practice the results of such a journey involve human freedom, moral imagination, ethical individualism, call it what you will.

All we can give of value as teachers with regard to spiritual realities is a path that can be followed or retraced. In geometry, I can show how the steps of a proof lead to a logical conclusion, but you must take that final intuitive leap yourself. If you do not “see” that these steps constitute a proof, all I can do as a teacher is retrace the path, perhaps using different language or different symbols in order to help you again to the brink of intuitive understanding. Anthroposophically-gained knowledge of the world, given to us in Steiner’s books and lectures, for example, can provide stepping stones akin to the statements in a geometric proof. They attain meaning, however, only as we use them to focus our attention, to trace and retrace a path to the spirit, to meaning, and to understanding.

This first point encompasses Steiner’s work in education and also the anthroposophical method and knowledge that underlies it—understandings of destiny, reincarnation, the place of human beings in the cosmos and in evolution, and so on. To treat these understandings as part of an ideology or worldview is to belittle them, to turn them into a religion. If they are true, they are true for all people and they are facts about the world; they are evidence of a science and a scientific method.

If the freedom to teach toward this path of understanding were denied, a teacher would have to feel that she could no longer teach as a “Waldorf” teacher. In this regard, I will add for more philosophical readers that I see Steiner’s work primarily as work in method, and that considerations of epistemology or ontology arise secondarily to this focus on method.

2. Development

In the future, all instruction must be built upon psychology developed from an
anthroposophical understanding of the world. (p. 49)

What lives in human
beings tends toward metamorphosis. If you can bring it about that the children
have concepts of respect and honoring, concepts of all that we can call, in an
all encompassing sense, a prayerful attitude, then such thoughts will be living
in children permeated with a prayerful attitude, and will remain into old age.
In old age, these concepts will be transformed into a capacity to bless and to
give others the results of a prayerful attitude. (p. 155)

You must be a good friend of natural development. (p. 180)[4]

Second, teachers address their students as developing human beings, beings who transform themselves unconsciously in youth and later become uniquely capable of self-transformation. In nature, metamorphoses and transformations are primarily visible. We can see a plant grow from shoot to leaves to flower, each stage presenting unforeseen changes of form. No one looking at a caterpillar for the first time would guess that it would soon be a butterfly. In human life, especially after childhood, however, transformation and development are not so readily visible.

Waldorf teachers seek patterns in human development and they also seek to be sensitive to the unique development of each student. They may fruitfully seek a common language with developmental psychologists from Jean Piaget to the present (see, for example, “The Seer and the Scientist,” Research Bulletin, Vol. XI, no. 1). If a teacher in a Waldorf school were prohibited from addressing his students according to a developmentally appropriate model, he might well feel he could no longer call himself a Waldorf teacher.

3. Three Kinds of Knowing

Whenever you want to suitably consider the human being from any particular
standpoint, you must always return to the three parts of the human soul—that is,
to cognition that occurs in thinking, to feeling, and to willing. (p. 106) [5]

Accumulating knowledge is like building a collection, right? Each piece in the collection is much like any other. A fact about astronomy is much like a fact about history or writing technique or piano playing or wine tasting or empathetic listening. A degree of certainty or truth adheres to it or is apparent in it, and we accept it for our—growing, we hope—stockpile of things that we know. It can be digitized and stored in a computer and shared online.

Well, no. Knowledge is not singular. Knowing the names of stars is not like knowing how to play the piano or like knowing how to offer solace to someone in pain. Like intelligence, which we used to believe was one thing—measured on an IQ test, for example, but now seen as, at least, a multi-faceted collection of human faculties—knowledge comes in different forms. We can know in different ways. Waldorf and Steiner schools emphasize in particular three ways of knowing, the conscious development of each corresponding roughly with preschool, elementary school, and high school.

Michael Polanyi called a first kind of knowing “tacit knowing”, knowing “more than we can say.” [6] Clearly, infants—those without voices, as the term itself suggests—know more than they can say. We can know how to cut a carrot, or the taste of the soup it makes, or how to play the viola, or how to solve a problem in geometry. We can describe these things in language, but the value, meaning, and even the truth of these activities—cutting, tasting, playing, solving—does not translate into language. These become apparent only when we learn to do these things ourselves. Without the experience of doing, often, knowing has little meaning.

You could write a manual describing what you do—as nurse, stockbroker, or artist—but, if you had to train someone to replace you, would you rather hand off instructions or offer an apprenticeship, some doing? Read a book on building a stone wall, and then claim that you know how to build one. Your aches and calluses will tell you another story. We learn much and know much through doing, and, often, doing precedes and informs our knowing. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of “doing” in preschool, before we emphasize other forms of knowing.

A second kind of knowing is aesthetic knowing. Its value is apparent in contrast to our concept of something that is anaesthetic, or numbing. Aesthetic knowing is alive, awake, and sensitive. It is knowing in heart and gut (yes, the brain plays its role, but we experience our feelings in our hearts and lungs and guts). It is intuitive (“taught from within”). It is a form of knowing especially valuable for artists, musicians, clinical psychologists, theoretical physicists, and even advertising copywriters. It is a form of knowing that connects us powerfully to the world. And it develops in children most readily when they have separated from their parents and begun to comprehend the world around them for themselves. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of beauty and feeling in the elementary school.

A third kind of knowing is knowing through thinking. By thinking, however, I mean a particular kind of thinking that attempts in Henri Bortoft’s phrase to “swim upstream,” reversing fragmentation, categorization, and specialization in order to recover wholeness.[7] Thinking logically with given postulates, thinking algorithmically, is “downstream” thinking, the outcome determined by the input. It is powerful but dead, inherited from the creative insight of others. Recognizing the validity of postulates different from convention, however, involves insight of our own. This synthetic, living thinking can encompass or embrace analysis, logic, and critical thinking. But it seeks to go beyond them to recover or reach the origin of creative thought and imagination. And it develops in students who are wrestling not so much with the world around them as with their own identities in that world. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance in high school of the development of thinking.

These three ways of knowing are cumulative and integrative. We do not leave one for the next, but build on what comes before. As adults, our thinking is enriched if we also know how to do and to feel. All three forms of knowing are present earlier, too—small children learning to walk and talk (two of the most important forms of doing) can also feel and think. But by emphasizing one way of knowing at the appropriate time, allowing other ways to develop simultaneously but sleepily, we work in accordance with children’s growth away from their parents and into the world and themselves. We know in our hands, in our hearts, and in our heads. We know goodness, beauty, and truth. The more ways we know, the more value we find in life, and the more value we bring to those around us and to whatever we are called to do.

Again, it tickles me to imagine that this third point is a subset of the first. Anyone treading a path of understanding will recognize different modes of existence and ways of knowing.

4. Social Health

Fourth, a school can provide profound examples and guidelines for a healthy life with other people. If they choose to, Waldorf school graduates know how to live with others in brotherhood and sisterhood, in solidarity. They know how to be the appropriate equal of any man or any woman. And they know where their individual freedom lies, the sort of freedom that laws and conventions cannot touch. Steiner’s description of a healthy “threefold” social organism can be seen as a common-sense description of reality—not a utopian vision that does not and will not exist—by students who have lived through years in a Waldorf school.

This point, too, derives from the first. Who, on a spiritual path, would not strive to bring into existence an ever-healthier social world?

5. Reverence and the World

Fifth, students receive a reverence for life and for the world; a concern for the environment, however defined. I mention this last and say the least about it here because as a society we have probably embraced this gift more fully in the past fifty years than we have the others. Peace education, environmental and ecological education, outdoor action programs, and other forms of holistic education may find fellow travelers in Waldorf teachers here.

Only in Waldorf?

Waldorf school curricula and methods lend themselves to an education in all of these five points. Different schools may struggle at times with one or another. Different teachers evince strengths in particular directions. Taken together, however, these cover the ground, I believe, of what is essential to Waldorf education. Any school, any teachers can give these gifts. But the sad truth is that in our world today only in Waldorf schools can you find teachers united in common purpose to strive to give their students fully and consistently what I have outlined here.

Not Alone

I am indebted to and have previously quoted Peter Curran, history teacher at the Waldorf School of Garden City, on Waldorf education (“No Such Thing,” Research Bulletin, Vol. VIII, no. 1). Curran wrote in the 1980s that there are 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.[8]

These points accord with the first four gifts I describe above, I believe, and are noteworthy in omitting consideration of social health. I believe this omission is a symptom of Curran’s generation; it is really only in the last couple of decades, in the United States, at least, that a serious conversation about the “social mission” of Waldorf education has been reinvigorated. Talk of a social mission was somewhat forgotten, we may posit, during the tension of the Cold War. Consideration of this hypothesis here, however, would take us too far afield.

The Big One

While the trappings of Waldorf education multiply beyond counting, the essentials, few in number, perhaps five, perhaps more or fewer, cohere toward one. Another approach to the essential nature of Waldorf education deserves mention. If my first five points present a chorus of gifts, this last image is a single, sounding gong. At the center of any method of teaching must reside an image of the human being who is learning and being taught, the human being becoming ever more human.

Previously, human beings were seen as born in original sin and, therefore, to be saved (Jonathan Edwards). Or they were seen as growing healthfully in a metaphorical garden, inadvertently damaged or corrupted by the unhealthful influence of imperfect civilization (Jean Jacques Rousseau). Or as “blank slates” on which society, civilization, and teachers could write (John Locke). Or as citizens to be educated for participation in a democratic government (Thomas Jefferson), amoral immigrants to be moralized (Horace Mann), future contributing members of a community (John Dewey), or, more recently, as biological systems that support brains that need to be programmed (Seymour Papert).

A more profound image of a human being arises if we consider that we are created in a creator’s image. I take this to mean not that God has ten fingers and ten toes, or a hairy chest, but that, like our creator, we are creative. An education that places creativity at its core, and that derives its methods from this understanding of imagination not as an accessory or enhancement to an academic education but as the ground from which all knowledge springs, may be called Waldorf education.

What is Creativity?

The meaning of creativity, however, is not clear. What does it mean to be creative? Does it mean a practice of art—and not science—without standards, objectivity, or rigor? Pursued this way, creativity is seen as a healthful hiatus from more important pursuits, a necessary venting before returning to the real business of life. Or is creativity a heaven-opening moment of insight, bestowed on some and not on others, “eurekas” and “ah-hahs” as gifts of divine grace? Pursued this way, it is, like the works that creative persons produce, unavailable for scientific study or human understanding.

Such views do not hold up to scrutiny.

History is replete with descriptions of moments of insight, from Archimedes on down, but we should not forget who the persons are who receive these insights. Mathematical truths may be raining down on you and me this moment, but, without rigorous training, hard work, a developed understanding of symbolic systems, and who knows what else, we are incapable of perceiving them.

Research in creativity by such eminent psychologists as Piaget’s pupil, Howard Gruber, demonstrates creativity to be something else altogether. For Gruber, whose seminal work was a study of Charles Darwin (Darwin on Man), creativity is a capacity of scientists as much as of artists. It results in novelty, new creations, and is the result of unique, creative human efforts. To honor the uniqueness of creative acts, Gruber questioned even such thoughtful research as the “multiple intelligence” work of Howard Gardner, and championed the case study method, the study of creativity person by person. (Gruber was not opposed to multiple intelligence theory, he just didn’t think it resulted in a description of creativity.)

This is not to say, however, that creativity cannot be studied scientifically. The lives of creative persons, as Gruber showed, have many points in common.[9]

· They undergo periods of apprenticeship.
· They work hard to achieve insight, and work hard after insight, expressing and testing it, putting it in a form that others may understand.
· They live lives in a “network of enterprise,” mutually supporting endeavors and experiences that contribute to creative work. Without Darwin’s avocational interest in geology, for instance, it is possible that he might not have achieved his insights into the evolution of living species.
· The work and lives of creative persons evolves, as well, demonstrating a (unique) pattern that may be understood and retraced by others.
· And, in order to make sense of their work, creative persons develop and employ “images of wide scope” or “ensembles of metaphor.” Darwin wrestled with the image we now know as the “tree” that showed the evolution of life, working through several branching images, including a coral.[10]

Gruber wondered to the end whether or not everyone is creative.[11] He chose to study eminent artists and scientists, and sometimes expressed the view that only a few persons are actually creative; the rest of us simply live our lives. But he also believed in the unity of human experience, and wondered what it might mean to say that everyone is creative in some way. Certainly the elements of his studies may be applied to the review—or conduct—of any life.

Creativity, Morality, and Freedom

Gruber also recognized the connection between creativity and morality:

Our conceptions of creativity and morality are intertwined in a number of ways.…
At once we see that the indispensable middle term between creativity and
morality is freedom. We can hardly speak of a moral act if the actor has no
choice. Creative work also requires inner freedom…. Creative work must be in
some ways kindred to the world, if not the world as it is, then the world as it
will or might be. It flows out of that world and it flows back into it. Thus the
creative person, to carry out the responsibility to self, the responsibility for
inner integrity, must also in some way be responsive to the world.[12]

Seen in this way, it seems clear that what Steiner called “ethical individualism” and “moral imagination” contribute to a conversation about creativity: “Freedom of action is thinkable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.”[13] And: “Free spirits need moral imagination to realize their ideas and make them effective. Moral imagination is the source of a free spirit’s actions. Therefore, only people who have moral imagination are really morally productive.”[14]

It’s Not All About Steiner

In arguing against one sort of fundamentalism—the sort that would mistake and assert superficial characteristics and techniques of Waldorf education for an essence—some readers may believe I am leaning toward another fundamentalism—if it’s not in Steiner’s work, it’s not Waldorf education. This is not the case. I am fully aware that many valuable characteristics of and practices in Waldorf schools today—including circle time, math gnomes, or walls of rainbow hue—have little relation to Steiner’s work. I believe, however, that, given our own limited insight, we must return again and again to Steiner’s work to check our progress, our understanding, and our interpretation against what he said. Without this ongoing and recursive process—joyfully returning to the well from which our work springs—we risk implementing not creative, innovative, living teaching, but becoming an increasingly muddy copy of a copy of a copy. And there’s little creative in that.

References

Barfield, Owen. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971.

Bortoft, Henri. The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 1996.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Friend. Ed. Barbara E. Rooke. 2 Vols. Vol. 4 of the Collected Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-present.

Fuchs, Stephen. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2001.

Gruber, H. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Gruber, H. and Doris Wallace. Creative People at Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Polanyi, Michael. “The Tacit Dimension.” New York: Doubleday & Co, 1966.

Steiner, Rudolf. Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1995.

————. Foundations of Human Experience. Robert Lathe and Nancy Parsons Whittaker, trans. CW 293. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

Winnicott, D. W. Thinking about Children. Eds. Ray Shepherd, Jennifer Johns, and Helen Taylor Robinson. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1996.

Endnotes

[1] Winnicott, D. W.,1996.
[2] See especially Fuchs, Stephen, 2001.
[3] See, for example, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1969-present. See also Barfield, Owen, 1971.
[4] All quotations here from Steiner, Rudolf, 1996.
[5] All quotations here from Steiner, Rudolf, 1996.
[6] Polanyi, Michael, 1966.
[7] Bortoft, Henri, 1996.
[8] Personal communication.
[9] References here to Gruber’s work are from the first two chapters of Gruber, H. and Doris Wallace. 1989. Creative People at Work. New York: Oxford University Press.
[10] Gruber, Howard, 1981.
[11] Personal communication.
[12] Gruber, H. and Doris Wallace, 1989, pp. 280-281.
[13] Steiner, Rudolf, 1995, p. 154.
[14] Ibid, p. 182.

The Seer and the Scientist: Rudolf Steiner and Jean Piaget on Children’s Development

Scrutiny
In the course of my research on the history of Waldorf schools in the United States many people with whom I spoke, admissions directors and teachers among them, casually compared Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on the development of children in stages with the developmental research of Jean Piaget. My initial reactions were that this comparison must be meant allegorically and that it wouldn’t bear scrutiny. Steiner and Piaget’s reputations were simply too dissimilar; what could the seer and the scientist have in common? The intention, it seemed, was to lend Piaget’s weight as a scientist to Steiner’s less familiar reputation as an educator and “spiritual scientist.” Comparing the two has not changed my suspicions regarding the intentions behind the comparison, but it has thrown some light on the intersection of, for education, arguably the two most important developmentalists of the twentieth century. The ways in which Steiner’s and Piaget’s ideas on child development are similar, and dissimilar, were not what I had expected.

Piaget on Education
Ignoring the many inferences regarding education that we may draw from Piaget’s research, he wrote surprisingly little on education. Only one essay, begun in 1935 and completed in 1965, examines education in general, including the application of Piaget’s research to education. The essay is a curious hodge-podge of explanation, correction, and opinion. Called “Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child,” (1935 and 1965) it begins by examining the psychological foundations of “new methods” in education, and concludes that “active” learning is superior to “passive” learning. It contains, however, the warning that “memory, passive obedience, imitation of the adult, and the receptive factors in general are as natural to the child as spontaneous activity.” (p. 696) This distinction between “passive” and “receptive” modes shows Piaget’s delicate attention to children’s inner worlds.

Piaget goes on to bemoan the degree to which education professionals in general have not applied what is known of child development to teaching. He remarks that many profound education reformers were philosophers or doctors, not pedagogues—Comenius, Rousseau, Froebel, Dewey, and Montessori among them. He points out, too, that their thinking and research have not become the foundation for a science of education:

The general problem is to understand why the vast army of educators now laboring
throughout the entire world with such devotion and, in general, with such
competence does not engender an elite of researchers capable of making pedagogy
into a discipline, at once scientific and alive, that could take its rightful
place among all those other applied disciplines that draw upon both art and
science… (p. 699)

Much of the rest of the essay gives Piaget’s opinions on the teaching of mathematics, philosophy, and the humanities. The essay concludes with a look at four categories of teaching methods: The receptive, the active, the intuitive and the programmed. By “intuitive,” Piaget means a method that asks students to infer an educational lesson from an external representation; manipulatives, filmstrips, and pottery are each intuitive by Piaget’s definition. For Piaget, the meaning of intuitive is literal and technical, not transcendental. Piaget’s last category, programmed teaching, includes, especially, early use of computers in the classroom, and has been fostered in the United States especially by Piaget’s pupil, Seymour Papert. (See Papert, 1980.) Piaget notes that many people confuse active and intuitive methods because they take activity too literally, forgetting or ignoring inner, mental activity.

Ginsburg on Steiner and Piaget
Despite the number of times I heard Steiner and Piaget mentioned in one breath, I am aware of only one published consideration of their work. This is a brief but excellent article by Iona Ginsburg (1982) that compares stages of children’s development as conceptualized by Rudolf Steiner and by Jean Piaget. She correlates Piaget’s stages of cognitive development—sensori-motor, concrete operations, and formal operations—with Steiner’s descriptions of human development—imitative, imaginative, and intellectual stages.

Piaget defines “stage” clearly, while Steiner uses a less technical vocabulary. For development to occur according to a change from one stage to another, according to Piaget, the order of succession may not vary; developed characteristics must be cumulative; periods of change must be followed by periods of equilibrium; and so on. (Piaget, 1955) These requirements apply, too, to Steiner's descriptions of development. Growth alone, as simple accumulation, is not developmental. “Phases” that come and go often do not meet the criteria for stage development. Age-appropriate learning or behavior may or may not occur within the context of stage development. Stage development is at once more rigorous and more global than common understandings of maturation. Stage development provides evidence of "metamorphosis," a change in form that signals a concurrent change in quality; the physical and physiological changes of puberty are accompanied by emotional and intellectual changes, and vice versa.

Among Ginsburg’s concerns, shared with Piaget himself, is the degree to which Piaget’s work, despite its apparent implications for education, has not been applied to classroom practice. She locates this lack in that Piaget’s research “leaves out vivid and vital aspects of the child’s total development—feeling, attachment, impulse, fantasy, and their impact on cognition itself.” (p. 328) Because Steiner focused on “the totality of development,” (p. 329) Ginsburg believes his work, despite its lack of conventional scientific rigor, has had greater success in influencing classroom practice.

In comparing Piaget’s and Steiner’s descriptions of stage development, Ginsburg is more specific with regard to ages than either Steiner or Piaget. Steiner (1965 and many other places) refers to a transformation “about age seven” (p. 20), more accurately associated with the loss of milk teeth, a process that often takes more than a year and can begin at age five or be prolonged well past age seven. Similarly, Piaget (1955) is at pains to emphasize “not the timing, but the order of succession [of acquisition]” in stage development. Chronology, he writes, “is extremely variable; it depends on the previous experience of the individuals, and not only on their maturation, and it depends especially on the social milieu that can accelerate or retard the appearance of a stage, or even prevent its appearance.” (p. 815) Steiner tacitly acknowledges this characteristic of a stage, too. While many Waldorf teachers speak of Steiner’s stages as if they possessed some concrete reality, Steiner acknowledged not only their relevance to a specific cultural here-and-now, but also their variation based on both spiritual and physiological variations among people. (See, for example, The Foundations of Human Experience, 1996, and Curative Education, 1972.) The point of Steiner’s descriptions was not to normalize a child’s place in a class—a constant danger of a developmental point of view, regardless of the developmentalist (see Morss, 1995)—but to provide insight for better teaching.

Ginsburg recognizes that:

Many of the contrasts [between Steiner and Piaget] are based on profound
differences in frame of reference and worldview. Piaget, who was not a teacher,
focused single-mindedly on the development of the structures of cognition in
children, from the perspective of a scientist who studied the changes with age
and the growth of the capacity to know. Steiner and the education based on his
insights have a view of the stages of child development based largely on
intuition, which encompasses awareness of the impact of feeling, fantasy [almost
certainly a British mistranslation of what is meant by “imagination”], form,
color, and human relatedness in cognitive development. (pp. 335-336)

Five Similarities
I agree with Ginsburg’s recognition of the differences between Steiner and Piaget, but I also believe that there are similarities that she has overlooked. I will examine four of these points below, supporting them with reference to Steiner’s early pamphlet, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. Readers familiar with Steiner’s work will recognize that he made similar points in dozens of other lectures and writings. More to the point, The Education of the Child was actually written by Steiner, not transcribed from shorthand notes of a lecture, and can therefore be held to be, within the bounds of translation, more precisely what he intended to say.

First, both Steiner and Piaget recognize the importance of imitation in the development of children. Steiner writes, “There are two magic words that indicate how the child enters into relations with his environment. They are: Imitation and Example… For no age in life is this more true than for the first stage of childhood, before the change of teeth… The child… does not learn by instruction or admonition, but by imitation.” (pp. 24-25) Piaget (1962) regards “imitation as the process that ensures the transition from sensori-motor intelligence to representative imagery.” (p. 509) That is to say, for example, that it is through imitation that an infant learns to speak. Further, Piaget (1966) describes the “mental image” as an “internalized imitation.” (p. 490) This could be Steiner’s language as well.

Second, both Steiner and Piaget recognize the importance of symbolic understanding. Steiner writes, “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.” (p. 33) Piaget, for example, writes that: “Symbolic play is the apogee of children’s play.” (p. 492)

Third, Piaget’s well-known developmental path from assimilation to equilibrium is mirrored in Steiner’s description of the process by which memories become concepts. “It is necessary for man not only to remember what he understands, but to understand what he already knows—that is to say, what he has acquired by memory in the way the child acquires language… First there must be [for example] the assimilation of historical events through the memory, then the grasping of them in intellectual concepts.” (p. 39) Not all memory-to-concept shifts achieve the status of Piagetian equilibrium, clearly, but, as each of Steiner’s stages is achieved, the quality of concepts may be said to alter significantly enough to equate with Piaget’s description. Specifically, writes Steiner, concepts in early life grow primarily from activity engendered through imitation and example; later, from feeling-imbued imagination and appropriate authority; and only later from a rational and potentially abstract understanding.

Last, both Steiner and Piaget developed corresponding “threefold” views of human psychology. Steiner described “the several faculties of the soul—thinking, feeling, and willing,” (1965, p. 41) while Piaget often described “subsystems” of “intellect,” “affect” and “activity”. (See 1966, p. 492, for example)

The central or overarching point of agreement, however, is that both Piaget and Steiner found children intrinsically interesting in themselves and valued children’s perception and experience on their own terms. Neither man forwarded a utilitarian or a “Whig” version of childhood (that is, one that is based on expectations of a known but yet-to-emerge adulthood).

A Big Difference
As much as their views may accord, Steiner’s and Piaget’s use of language differs enormously in connotation. When Piaget uses a phrase like “mental image” (1963) or a word like “imitation” (1962), he is using the terms to designate generalizations based on controlled observations in his life and in his laboratory. When Steiner uses the same terms, he is using them as indications of concepts that have layers, and may be understood at once, for example, on the generic level on which Piaget operates, and also on potentially more profound and more individual levels. Both men were empiricists, but they would clearly have disagreed on the limits of empiricism. I do not believe it is fair to say, as Ginsburg does, that Steiner and Piaget necessarily differed in worldview. It is not possible to intuit from Piaget’s careful scientific writings what his actual worldview may have been.

It is tempting to say that Piaget’s results, more conventionally scientific and more generic than Steiner’s, could be subsumed or swallowed whole by Steiner’s more inclusive, comprehensive view or experience. This does a disservice to both men, however, in that Steiner’s point was often to transcend the generic (See, for example, Bortoft, 1996, especially “Modes of Consciousness,” pp. 61-68), while Piaget aimed to “make of epistemology an experimental discipline as well as a theoretical one.” (1995, pp. xi-xii) Both Steiner and Piaget foreswore theorizing as an end in itself. Both believed powerfully in the value of experience. Experience, for Steiner, however, expands as faculties of perception and conception evolve, and is, at root, imaginative and unbounded. Experience, for Piaget, is given through relatively fixed relationships of sense organs to mind, and, within these limits, may be explored through controlled study.

References
Bortoft, H. (1996) The wholeness of nature: Goethe’s way toward a science of conscious participation in nature. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press.
Ginsburg, I. (1982) Jean Piaget and Rudolf Steiner: Stages of child development and implications for pedagogy. Teachers College Record, 84 (2), pp. 327-337.
Morss, J. (1995) Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental psychology. New York: Routledge.
Papert, S. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas. New York: HarperCollins.
Piaget, J. (1935 and 1965) Science of education and the psychology of the child. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Piaget, J. (1955) The stages of intellectual development in childhood and adolescence. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Piaget, J. (1962) The role of imitation in the development of representational thought. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Piaget, J. (1966) The semiotic or symbolic function. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Piaget, J. (1995) Foreword. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1963) Mental images. In H. Gruber & J. Vonéche (Eds.) The essential Piaget. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Steiner, R. (1965) The Education of the child in the light of anthroposophy. GA 34. 2nd English ed. G. & M. Adams (Trans.) New York: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, Rudolf (1996) The Foundations of Human Experience. GA 293. Lathe, R. and N. Whittaker (Trans.) Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (1972) Curative education. GA 317. M. Adams (Trans.) London: Rudolf Steiner Press.

Public Education: The Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School

Locate the impressive new Milwaukee art museum sailing into Lake Michigan, on the shoreline drive and shadowed by downtown Milwaukee. Now drive straight west, away from the lake, away from money and away from the Midwest. The African-Americans who largely inhabit the “inner city” of Milwaukee still speak with the southern accents of their grandparents and great-grandparents, blacks who came north to escape the memories of slavery, the bigotry of the south, the rural poverty of the depression. In a neighborhood of run-down but habitable row houses, Christian churches of many Protestant sects, and check-cashing holes-in-the-wall, you will find a modern school building, brick with bright tile accents, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School. It is the only Waldorf school in the United States that is, simply, a public school. It is not a charter school, and does not receive money from student vouchers. It houses around 310 students, 98 or 99 per cent African-American, in grades K-5. Like many urban schools but unlike most Waldorf schools in the U.S., children may eat breakfast before school and stay long afterward in “wraparound” programs. It is one of about 115 public elementary schools in the Milwaukee district, a “specialty” school in a “choice” program, created by forward thinkers in Milwaukee in 1991. Other choice schools include schools that use Montessori methods, schools that emphasize the educational use of technology, and “language immersion” schools that teach in Spanish, French, German, or sign language.

A paragraph in a school selection guide published by the school district describes the school this way:

Urban Waldorf follows a year-round calendar using a trimester system with three
breaks during the year and no school during the month of July. Its curriculum
reflects the phases of child development. Concepts are expanded through
movement, music, recitation, visual arts, and traditional reading, writing and
math. Waldorf methods develop clarity of thought, sensitivity of feeling, and
strength of will. Specially-trained Waldorf teachers stay with their class
groups as they move through the grades.

Unlike independent Waldorf schools, Urban Waldorf is required to give standardized tests, and they were being administered during the week I visited. Several faculty members characterized the students, apologetically, as “on edge” because of the tests, but nearly every student I saw was well-behaved and courteous. A third grade teacher said that the two weeks of testing were disruptive but “a small price to pay” for being able to teach the way she wanted to teach the rest of the year. Teachers were attentive to their students, and I had no sense that this was caused by my presence. Mark Birdsall, then “implementer” (a paid liaison between the Milwaukee public school system and the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA)) at the school, described this attentiveness as usual and necessary because of the behavioral and emotional difficulties that some students suffered. “Things can get out of hand pretty quickly,” he said. Laura Birdsall, a fourth grade teacher, characterized her class as having half the students working up to grade level, and including 3 cognitively disabled and 4 learning disabled students in a class of 21. She also described a student who had suffered horrific abuse—being doused with boiling water—at home. Teachers monitored students more closely than in any Waldorf school I have seen. Absence required a letter from home upon return. Teasing was shut down instantly. Speech was monitored as in this exchange during a time when children were working quietly at their desks:

Student: “He sharpening his pencil.”
Teacher (calmly): “He is . . . ?”
Student: “He is sharpening his pencil.”
Teacher (matter-of-fact): “Standard English.”

The faculty of the Urban Waldorf School is about half African-American. Administrators believe it would be better—not that it isn’t acceptable as is—to have more black teachers, but trained Waldorf teachers of color are few and far between. Except for a group trained at the founding of the school, few exist. The school hopes, with a charter Waldorf school nearby (the Tamarack School) and the Prairie Hill Waldorf School, half an hour west of Milwaukee, to implement a new round of training soon. In the meantime, the school has to accept teachers, white and black, who will get on-the-job training and begin to employ Waldorf methods as they learn them. Among these teachers, attitudes vary, according to those with whom I spoke, regarding Waldorf methods. One teacher I observed, able, kind and diligent, did not say a morning verse with her class, for example, although the curriculum she followed would have been recognizable to Waldorf teachers anywhere in the U.S. (Saying a prayer-like morning verse is a universal custom among Waldorf schools.)

The school owes its existence, initially, to Mark Stamm, Robert Peterkin and Mary Bills. Mr. Stamm, a former student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (UWM), and an anthroposophist, apparently suggested to Superintendent Peterkin, now at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, that Milwaukee ought to include a Waldorf school as one of the choices among its schools. Peterkin investigated and approved, supported by Mary Bills, then president of the Milwaukee school board. Ann Pratt, an experienced Waldorf teacher from New Hampshire, took on a role as liaison or “implementer” to facilitate communication between the largely independent world of Waldorf education in the United States and the Milwaukee public school bureaucracy and to aid in training Milwaukee public school teachers in Waldorf methods. In this she was assisted by Betty Staley, an experienced Waldorf teacher and teacher at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California, and Francis Vig, a teacher at the Chicago Waldorf School. Belden Paulsen, a professor at UWM, made possible an accredited training, and Dorothy St. Charles, a public school teacher at the time, stepped up to the principalship of the school.

I asked Paulsen why Milwaukee, of all places, should be the first—and so far only—public district to open a Waldorf school. He characterized Milwaukee as having its fair share of conservative segregationist racists, but cited the city’s progressive tradition: The mayors of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960, for example, were socialists, he said. More important, he ascribed the success of the school to “a few creative, innovative individuals,” and emphasized his belief that change can be accomplished by a few key people.

He saw no reason why every large public school district in the country couldn’t adopt a choice system similar to Milwaukee’s, and include within it a school or two that uses Waldorf methods. On the other hand, he quoted a teacher from the early days of the school saying that Waldorf teaching isn’t “simply a job; it’s a way of life.” The demands of Waldorf teaching, including especially training time and expenses beyond those required for state certification, could be daunting, if not prohibitive. He recalled that the school received a dozen or so calls from school districts as far away as California and Texas, but that early interest never amounted to much. He characterized outside interest as relatively superficial; without a commitment specifically to Waldorf educational methods, it seemed, the effort required to implement such a school was too great.

I asked Cheryl Colbert, a former teacher at the school and now principal, about accusations of racism or Eurocentrism regarding Waldorf education. She, an African-American, claimed these were not an issue for her or for the school. “I don’t know where Steiner got them,” she said, “but storytelling, music, movement . . . these are part of the African tradition, and they’re good for children.”

I attended a Black History Month assembly at the school. In some ways it was like Waldorf school assemblies everywhere. Children entered by classes, generally quietly, and sat in neat rows on the gym floor. Several students, led by a teacher, played music at the front of the room. A teacher stood to lead the assembly and introduce the performers. The differences were in the culture of the school. The initial music was African drumming. The assembly leader used a microphone, and was more flamboyant than other (white) Waldorf teachers I have seen. Many of the presentations would not have seemed out of place at any Waldorf school—students reciting poetry, for example—while others definitely expressed the rhythm and music of Africa and an African-American heritage. The assembly ended with the school’s theme song, more like a midwestern school anthem than the lyrical stuff you might hear at other (coastal) Waldorf schools.

For many Waldorf teachers and for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), a public school cannot be a Waldorf school; it can only claim to be “Waldorf-inspired.” I find little evidence to support making such a distinction in Steiner’s work. In fact, Nancy Parsons Whittaker quotes Steiner as saying that his methods may be applied “anywhere there is the will to do it.” (2001) AWSNA’s argument would surely be that any school or teacher can use Steiner’s methods, but only in an independent school can teachers work freely “out” of anthroposophy, and only in this case can a school consider itself a Waldorf school. Other than providing a label for parent consumption, if you will, the distinction seems facile to me; a child’s experience at the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School is the experience of an education according to Steiner’s educational principles. Some teachers are anthroposophists and some are not, but this is true in private Waldorf schools as well.

Frankly, under Dorothy St. Charles’ leadership, the school seemed to have achieved a remarkable degree of independence. Ms. St. Charles related several stories regarding curricular decisions that she and her faculty were able to make as a school against the decisions of the Milwaukee superintendent of schools. She was able, with her superintendent’s support, to ignore district mandated reading curricula in order to allow her teachers to teach reading as they found Steiner suggested. They met weekly, as Waldorf school teachers do, despite union contracts that limit faculty meetings to once a month. The union filed grievances but never pursued them—the teachers in the school met willingly.

Eugene Schwartz draws a distinction between Waldorf and Waldorf-inspired schools in that laws regarding the separation of church and state (or perhaps better stated, against the state establishment of religion) mean that students in public schools, regardless of teaching method, cannot, for example, include the name “God” in their morning verse. This seems a somewhat nominalist and picayune point; soviet state prohibitions against religion did not prevent Aleksander Solzhenitsyn from maintaining his beliefs. And whether or not a teacher or a student is allowed to speak a word or not seems to have little bearing on inner attitude or pedagogical experience.

One first grader I saw was so pleased with his work—copying a sentence from the blackboard: “Mufaro had two girls, one sweet and one sour.”—that he held his paper before his face and kissed it. According to conventional Waldorf school wisdom, the teaching of writing in first grade would be too soon. Standards—and a minority community that embraces those standards as necessary to ensure so far as possible a decent education—require teachers to accelerate the curriculum. Teachers in Milwaukee work hard to convey, for example, the artistry from which written letters arose historically, before they begin teaching writing, however, and are acutely aware of the compromises they must make to succeed as an “inner city” public school.

(Since I wrote this in 2002, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School has changed buildings and grown to include 475 students in grades K-8. Not much discussed, it's the largest Waldorf school in the U.S. Cheryl Colbert is still the principal.)

A Small School in Medicine Root

Drive southeast from Rapid City, South Dakota, on Route 44, down into the Cheyenne River valley, past the ranches on the plateaus above the river, on poor land that will soon look rich by comparison with the near-desert given to the Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Pass through Scenic, SD, the last, depressed storefronts before the Rez, and pass within sight of the rock castles of the Badlands in their Roadrunner-and-Wile E. Coyote strangeness. Now you’re on the reservation itself. The herds of shaggy beef cattle and blunt-nosed, round-bellied horses, animals that ignore the low barbed-wire fences that line the roads, belong to Lakota ranchers. The rolling, treeless hills trick an east-coast eye. Is that next ridge half a mile away, or five miles? Oncoming headlights appear minutes before you pass an old truck, Lakota men seated three abreast, gone at 70 mph--140 if you add your own speed to theirs. Small ash trees, cottonwoods and scruffy pines huddle and snake through creases between the hills.

The Pine Ridge Reservation is only a bit smaller than Massachusetts--minus Cape Cod--about 50 miles north to south and 100 miles east to west. Depending on whom you ask, the population is between 15,000 and 30,000 people. The U.S. government census of 1990 lists a smaller figure of little more than 12,000, but two Lakota men with whom I spoke emphasized the larger number. Many of the Lakota, they claimed, lead semi-nomadic lives, lives that stretch from Alberta to Nevada, and that disdain the white distinction between nations such as Canada and the United States. Further, suspicion of the government certainly leads to underreporting and to a lack of faith that any attempt is really made to obtain an accurate number. A smaller number, they claim, means fewer dollars for the Reservation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

Turn left at the convenience store in Sharp’s Corner, and drive eight miles to Kyle (“Pejuta Haka,” “Medicine Root,” in Lakota). Trailers, shacks and small houses, some old, some new, are scattered like dice over the landscape. Many have half a dozen old cars, scavenged for parts, up on blocks or down in mud and frost, littering the yards. A halo of old tires, clothes lines--laundry sideways in the wind--and children’s toys around each house soon gives way to the relentless rise and fall of the grassy hills. Oddly, the untidiness of this rural poverty can’t compete with the bed of landscape and sheet of sky; what would be eyesores elsewhere are swallowed by the majesty of the land. People with an astonishing gift for painting and sculpture easily ignore the junkyard aesthetic of their own homes. (On the other hand, describing white people’s impressions of the Rez, John Haas said, “You see ‘Dances With Wolves’ and think, ‘How beautiful!’ You wouldn’t mind driving around. But a week of driving 200 miles a day will change your mind.” It’s 80 miles or so to the nearest supermarkets, in Rapid City.)

A right on a rutted dirt road puts you within sight of the Wolakota Waldorf School, two trailers, one doublewide, the other not. Three vans, one of which works, a Ford, a Dodge and a Chevy--effectively preventing part-swapping that might make life a bit easier--are parked before the west side of the main building. On the wall is a medicine wheel, a circle enclosing a cross, about eight feet in diameter, painted in traditional colors, black, red, yellow, and white. Four directions, four winds, four races of people.

The trailer opens into a main room--classroom, dining room and kitchen in one. Off one end are a larder, the bathroom and an office. Off the other, the teacher’s bedroom. Six students presently attend the school, three in kindergarten and three in first grade. The kindergarten teacher, who lives at the school, is a white man named Christopher Young (who is, incidentally, my half-brother). He attended Waldorf schools himself on the east coast--the Hawthorne Valley School and The Waldorf School of Garden City--and had some observation and student-teaching experience before he took the job in South Dakota. The first grade teacher lives nearby with his family. His name is Reggie Little Killer. He is a Lakota man, a Marine veteran and a Mormon. He believes strongly in Waldorf education, he says, but has little experience of it and virtually no training in its methods.

School comes with breakfast and lunch. There is no tuition. Unemployment runs between 75% and 85% on the Reservation, and most families clearly cannot afford to pay even a small tuition. The teachers are paid $10,000 to $12,000 per year from money raised primarily in Europe, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Some summers, Mr. Young or Mr. Little Killer travel to Europe with photographs of the school, visiting different Waldorf schools, raising money. Isabel Stadnick, wife of Bob Stadnick, deceased, one of the founders of the Wolakota Waldorf School, also raises money for the school in Switzerland. The school also receives small contributions from some Waldorf schools in the United States, and is planning a more concerted fund-raising effort.

The Reservation, I hear, attracts a large number of central and northern European tourists in the summer (I was there in bleak February). Many come for a “spiritual” experience they cannot seem to find in Europe but that they believe lives strongly in the native Americans and the austere land of the Rez. A Swedish woman camped alone on a butte, vision-questing. It’s something of a joke to the Lakota, for many of whom spirituality is simply not something foreign or exotic. I was impressed, for example, by the effortless, seamless expression of prayer before a conference I attended and before each meal. Everyone stands, and someone is asked to say a prayer. The prayers I heard were an easy combination of Lakota tradition--mention of the Great Spirit, grandparents before us and grandchildren after us--and Protestant Christianity--ad hoc, “traveling mercies” for those attending, and thanks for the gifts around us. Some were in English, some in Lakota. Some ended with “Amen,” some with the Lakota words “Mi’takuye’ Oya’s’in,” “All of my relations.” Before sitting, many Lakota would add the phrase, “Oh han,” expressing agreement with what had just been said. If the Lakota have formulaic, written, memorized prayers, I did not hear them.

In the late 1980s, several Lakota people, including John Haas, Lemoine Pulliam, Robert Stadnick, and Ermina Red Owl, active in local schools but suspicious of involvement with the elected tribal Council, believed there had to be a better way to educate children. Dropout rates at the public schools on the Rez were approximately 70%, they said. Schools, under Federal law, could not acknowledge Lakota spiritual traditions, which would conflict with the “establishment of religion” clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And as money found its way from the BIA through the tribal Council to the schools, it was allegedly funneled off by rampant corruption of elected and appointed school officials and others. School governance, spirituality, and teaching and learning. In each of these areas, these people believed, there had to be a better way to educate children. And in their research, according to John Haas, the one name that cropped up again and again was “Waldorf.” So, knowing relatively little beyond what they had read, they founded the Wolakota Waldorf Society.

Robert Stadnick, school custodian at the public Little Wound School in Kyle; Norman Underbaggage, a lawyer; and Richard Moves Camp, a medicine man from nearby Wanbli, SD, traveled to Dornach, Switzerland, to research Waldorf education. There they met with Dr. Heinz Zimmerman, head of the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society, who was “extremely enthusiastic about the idea” of a Waldorf school on the reservation, according to a promotional pamphlet produced by Mr. Stadnick. This trip raised money for the school, as well, which then opened in 1993. The small school began with only a kindergarten, but the founders hoped it would find support in the community and grow quickly through twelve grades.

According to some rumors, however, rumors that have hurt fundraising efforts since, Mr. Stadnick appropriated some of the money intended for the school in order to build himself a large house. (The house is now a bed-and-breakfast owned and run by Lemoine Pulliam and his German wife, Ulrike Frei. It is by far the largest and best appointed house I saw on the Reservation, although in a middle class suburb of any city in the United States it would pass unnoticed but for four round rooms that protrude from the ground floor. These are based on traditional tipis; Lakota life is lived in a circle literally and metaphorically.) It would be almost impossible to substantiate--or disprove--such rumors today, but, according to another version of the story, Mr. Stadnick’s wife, Isabel, brought money of her own to the marriage, money enough to build a large house.

Climb a small hill behind the school, less than two hundred yards, and you can see the rocky spine of a ridge a mile to the south, beyond the school and the track of the road. Hills roll for miles to the north. East, one small house. Little else. The wind drives ice before it, and provides the only sound. At your feet, another medicine wheel, about 18 inches in diameter, made of small rocks and pebbles. In the center, wrapped in red cloth tied at the ends, like hard candies, are ceremonial offerings, probably tobacco. Here, in what is literally the backyard of the Waldorf school, people used to come on vision quests. Again, I am struck by the nearness to the road, the school, the town. Spirituality is part of life here, not distant in space or in mind. I walk down the hill, away from the tiny acropolis behind this struggling school.

***
At the invitation of the Wolakota Waldorf School, I returned to participate in a teacher-training workshop. I remained after the conference to see the school in operation. The day I observed was typical in most respects. History cannot be built on one day of observation, but this day contributes to an image of contemporary Waldorf schools, an image that is part of a changing history.

The school has three teachers now: Susan Bunting, an experienced, trained kindergarten teacher from England and then Vermont; Christopher Young (mentioned above); and Edwin Around Him, a jack-of-all-trades who teaches Lakota language and culture. There is talk of, eventually, converting the school into a Lakota immersion school. (Reggie Little Killer discovered that teaching was not the career for him, and has moved on.) The school has grown from 6 to 21 students in kindergarten and third grade. Mr. Young, in good Waldorf tradition, has remained with the class that he started with in first grade. Because money and teachers were lacking, this means there are no first nor second grades. Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting are certain that, with funding, they could add first and second (and next year, third) grades. They have a small pool of talented and interested local people, two Lakota and one white, who would be willing to teach, and many families who would send students to the school. Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting are in the middle of a fundraising campaign, based on a poster and a letter from the school, and their joy was obvious at receiving a $100 donation from a medical doctor on the east coast the day I observed. They presently run the school, including instructional salaries, on $32,000 per year, or about $75 per day excluding salaries.

Their day begins before 6 am, putting classrooms in order for the day, and by 7:15 Mr. Young left to drive an hour and a quarter bus route to pick up about two-thirds of the students (the rest are dropped off by their parents). Ms. Bunting stayed at the school to prepare breakfast for all of us. Mr. Young stopped first at a general store--an unmarked metal barn with gas pumps out front--to pick up milk. The store doesn’t need a sign because everyone knows about it, Mr. Young said, and it stays in business by bootlegging alcohol, illegally, from the back.

The bus route wound through the town of Kyle and surroundings. Children appeared from derelict trailers, run-down government-built housing, and small ranch houses. They were neatly but frequently underdressed, and got in the van eagerly. They obviously had much affection for Mr. Young, telling him “knock-knock” jokes and teasing him. They also were precociously aware of mainstream American culture, far from the Rez, talking about movies like “The Matrix” and “Fast and Furious.” Their conversation was larded with violent images (“I’ll blow up that house with my bazooka.”), but my overriding impression was of their sweetness and openness. They looked after each other in small ways, buckling the seat belts of younger children, offering to lend a sweater, and asked many questions about my life in Massachusetts. Given the harsh home lives and poverty from which many of the children come, they were extremely well-disciplined and mature. A calm word from a teacher was enough to still them instantly. Eleven children, about two-thirds of the possible total, got on the van. Mondays and Fridays are not well-attended, Mr. Young told me, because of family activities that may involve driving to or from a powwow, for example.

We returned to the school a bit after 8:30, and all the students followed Mr. Young to the top of a knoll behind the school. We stood in a circle, as they do each morning, to say the morning verse. Then Mr. Young greeted each student in Lakota. Some responded in Lakota, and some in English (all but one of the students is Lakota).

Breakfast was cold cereal and milk, sugar or honey, and fruit juice. The tables were laid immaculately, with cloth napkins and rings, and children sat to bless the meal and eat. They chatted during breakfast, the routine well-established. After breakfast, the teachers put out bins of soapy water and students cleaned and dried their own dishes; a couple took it on themselves to wash my dishes for me.

The kindergarten children left the table to play, which they did spontaneously and imaginatively. The two boys who had been discussing bazookas and explosions on the bus stood at a play stove cooking an imaginary meal for the rest of the class. Other students built with blocks or played with dolls.

The third grade building is a shed, really, with a classroom about 15 by 20 feet behind an unfinished plywood alcove or mudroom off which are an enclosed toilet and a small storage closet. Untrimmed windows look roughly north and south, and a “blackboard” is painted on the east wall. Student paintings are pinned to the walls, and some seedlings rest on a shelf near the south window. There is a sink and some storage space in the rear of the room, with a recognizable clutter of painting supplies, chalk, beeswax for modeling, crayons and drinking mugs. The desks and chairs are hand-me downs from the local public school, or look like this, formica and brown-painted steel. The walls are painted a cool blue. There are 7 third graders.

The third graders sauntered up to their building, where they said another verse and then answered math problems that Mr. Young asked them to solve in their heads. Their abilities varied tremendously, and Mr. Young tailored his questions appropriately. He then asked for quiet and told part of the Lakota creation myth. Mr. Young spoke the names of the gods in Lakota, so it was hard for me to follow, but the story involved the creation of plants, with their differently colored flowers, and animals, with their different numbers of legs. When Mr. Young sensed attention flagging, he ended the lesson, and the students poured out for recess.

The playground consisted of a small swing, a climbing structure, and a (broken) slide. These occupied one end of a level dirt patch about 25 yards long and 10 yards wide. In the middle was one pole of a broken volleyball set, with shreds of netting wrapped around it. The children quickly decided to play an imaginative game of tag, similar to “Red Rover”, with the volleyball pole as “home base.” They were remarkably uncompetitive, taking the game seriously, but not crowing about winning, losing, or rules violations. This attitude manifested throughout the day in each activity, and I take it to be part of their culture, part that has not been destroyed by the circumstances of their lives. One boy had brought a baseball and bat, and I pitched in turn to those who wanted to play. Each batted until he got one solid hit, then gave the bat to the next hitter. Older children helped younger ones hold the bat and stand properly.

Following recess, the class returned for a brief math class, and then it was time for lunch--sausages, potatoes and mixed frozen vegetables. Several of the students drowned their food in ketchup. The routine was the same as that at breakfast, although some of the kindergarten children were noticeably tired, slumping in their chairs and having a hard time finishing their meals. (Ms. Bunting described some students living in large extended families in very small houses, and not getting to sleep until after midnight.) After lunch, the kindergarten bedded down for rest, and the third grade had painting. Once again, their mood was calm, serious, and good-humored. They were eager and helpful in setting up to paint and cleaning the room at the end of the day. A stepladder from outside the building was brushed off to provide an easel on which the teacher could demonstrate.

School ended at 2:30, and students piled into the van. Mr. Young’s route was extra-long because one parent had asked him to drop his daughter off at her aunt’s house, far outside of town. Mr. Young returned to the school a bit after 4 pm, during which time Ms. Bunting had washed the pots from lunch. They had about an hour to unwind before they cooked dinner for themselves (and me), cleaned up, maintained buildings or van or kept appointments in town, and began to prepare for the following day. The pace at which Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting worked was relaxed and deliberate but ceaseless. While students were in the school, the teachers’ focus never left them.

Monday is not a Lakota language day, so Mr. Around Him was not officially there, although he showed up at lunch time to discuss car trouble he was having. As soon as he walked throught the door, he was surrounded by, especially, the younger students. They clung to him and gazed at his face. (Mr. Around Him normally drives the van, but suffered a diabetic seizure a couple of weeks before I arrived and was awaiting a doctor’s clearance to continue this work.)
The day I observed was postcard-perfect, warming quickly into the 80s. Other days, the dirt roads are impassably rutted, or the van won’t start. Then Mr. Young cancels school and waits, or repairs the van. There is no set number of school days, and the schedule is extremely flexible. Mr. Around Him is expected on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but lives far from town and does not have a reliable vehicle. The school runs on “Indian time,” something Mr. Young seemed more content with than did Ms. Bunting, although, often, neither has a choice.

I realized on this second visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation that, despite my attempts at a realistic view of, for example, Native American spirituality, I had romanticized it. I had initially taken, for instance, the prayer wheels on the school building and on the top of the knoll behind the school as evidence of a worldview. Come to find out that both are the work of German visitors, not of the Lakota people.

Before dinner on the first day of my second visit, Edwin Around Him held a small styrofoam bowl containing bits of each of the dishes we were to eat. We stood in a circle and he said a prayer in Lakota. Then he handed the bowl to Mr. Young and said brightly, “Now, go run up that hill!” I assumed the food would be placed at the top of the knoll as an offering to the spirits.

After dinner we walked up the hill to survey the school’s land and picture plans for developing the school when more money is raised. No styrofoam bowl in sight! A new, larger medicine wheel in a saddle between two small hills, however. I turned to Mr. Young: “You’ve got a new, larger medicine wheel,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, resignedly, “the Germans built it last summer.” “And where’s the bowl of food?” I asked. “Oh, around the corner of the school,” he said, which meant that it was in some undergrowth near the non-working vans. “You don’t take it anywhere in particular?” “No, just outside.” Telling Mr. Young to run up the hill had been a joke for my benfit.

Here I was, continually arguing against the improper objectification of things like Waldorf education that were not objects, coming to realize that I hadn’t given the Lakota credit for the same concept. Tops of hills, medicine wheels made of stone, and small dishes of food are not the point. The land on which we were standing wasn’t even Indian land until a bit over a hundred years ago when the Lakota were sent there, from more fertile and arguably more beautiful land in the Black Hills, by the whites. The Lakota could find a holy site, or make one, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but if life took them elsewhere, as it had brought them here, they could do the same.

(Since I wrote this in 2002, Lemoine Pulliam died--he was diabetic--and Ulrike left the reservation, likely to return to Germany. The school closed briefly after Chris Young moved to New Hampshire, but it retained its Board of Trustees and then re-opened as a kindergarten only. Patricia Lambert is the current kindergarten teacher. The school's current website is http://www.lakotawaldorfschool.org.)