Let’s face it. Here is a question central to the practice of Waldorf education: Why are some Waldorf schools and Waldorf school teachers so rigid and dogmatic?
I have five operating theories and would be glad to hear more, so long as they’re sincere and expressed politely. Here they are in the order in which they occur to me:
1. Do we express the zeal of adult converts, treating a method of education as a religion, confusing method with world-view?
2. Do we suffer from insecurity because none of us can measure up to our image of Steiner’s expectations and, perhaps, we believe our colleagues will criticize us if we appear to think too strongly for ourselves?
3. Do we allow “lowest common denominator” extremism in so-called consensus decision-making (those who feel most strongly about an issue forward their views or block others and receive little opposition from those who don’t feel so strongly)?
4. Is a rigid, dogmatic, literalist attitude toward the world a default position of our modern mentality, one that doesn’t cause us trouble when we’re washing the car or watching a movie, one that is disguised by the ease with which we can get through each day but which confronts us when we try to participate in the life of an idealistic institution like a Waldorf school?
5. In the absence of a clear culture of our own—distancing ourselves, for better and worse, from our own American culture—do we unknowingly perpetuate and assimilate to a culture that, prior to the loosening and opening of the last half century (civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement, the democratizing influence of television and the Internet), simply was more rigid and dogmatic—I mean, particularly, German culture in the 1920s, when Waldorf education got its start?
