We learn with more than just our heads. Lots of us, not just those in Waldorf schools, agree with this.
In 1956 (and after), to take a prime example, Benjamin Bloom described a taxonomy or hierarchical organization of learning within a threefold context of cognition (thinking), affect (feeling), and psychomotor behavior (will). Based on continuing research, his taxonomy has since been modified and now includes these six levels, from the highest to the most basic: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering.
Based on the work of John Gardner at the Garden City Waldorf School in the 1950s and 1960s and Douglas Gerwin since then, Waldorf schools approach each grade of high school differently in terms of assignments, expectations, and the development of thinking.
Looking over their work recently in preparation for a faculty meeting, it occurred to me that John Gardner almost certainly took Bloom’s work and compressed it—six levels sandwiched into four years of high school. And it makes sense to do this. Bloom’s work was based on higher education, on students who had largely passed the developmental stage of adolescence. For those teaching adolescents, a gradual introduction to more sophisticated thinking makes sense.
Interestingly, Gardner had the insight to move the synthesis required of creativity to the head of the list before a reassessment of Bloom’s research in the 1980s that did the same thing—earlier, “evaluating” was higher than “creativity.”
Our high school Core Teachers study education at each of our faculty meetings, and use the concepts outlined below in creating assignments in literature, history, science, and other subjects based on this understanding of thinking, learning, and mastery.
Ninth graders focus on accurate observation and description.
• Key words appropriate for 9th grade assignments include these: Observe, describe, note, summarize, re-tell, sequence, depict, illustrate, name, report, specify, and state.
• Questions for 9th graders might begin: What…?
Tenth graders focus on objective comparison.
• Key words for 10th grade assignments include these: Compare, contrast, difference, similarity, equation, equivalence, inequality, analogy, affinity, relationship, balance, weigh, connect, correlate, match, and proportion.
• Questions for 10th graders might begin: How…?
Eleventh graders focus on metamorphosis or transformation (building up) and analysis of a whole into parts (taking apart).
• Key words for 11th grade assignments include these: Analyze, abstract, theory, growth, transformation, metamorphosis, change, interpret (parts), make-up, essay, dissect, test, influence, involve, estimate, scrutinize, divide, and cause (and effect).
• Questions for 11th graders might begin: Why…?
Twelfth grade aims at individual synthesis; that is, forming an argument using the methods of grades 9-11 to present a coherent point of view that represents a student’s own view.
• Key words for 12th grade assignments include these: Synthesis, meaning, interpretation (whole), judgment, contemplation, reflection, integrate, assemble, combine, unite, unify.
• Questions for 12th graders might begin: Who…? (in the sense of a student’s relationship to the material; and, ultimately, who am I?)
Showing posts with label gardner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gardner. Show all posts
Friday, December 3, 2010
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Representations of Waldorf Education IV: The Experience of Knowledge
The Experience of Knowledge is a collection of John Gardner’s essays, written over his twenty-five year tenure as Faculty Chairman of the Waldorf School of Garden City (originally the Waldorf School of Adelphi College, an experimental school started largely at the behest of Adelphi trustee Alarik Myrin; it obtained autonomy from Adelphi in 1973 and incorporated a board of trustees in 1979). The book is organized in three parts. The first contains Gardner’s earlier, grandly philosophical essays on education. An example is “What is Man?” an essay that argues that human beings are more than “organisms,” despite the reductive conclusions of John Dewey, Gestalt psychologists, and, especially, a now forgotten book, Education and the Nature of Man. Gardner’s central point is that self-knowledge, the springboard for any claims about the organismic (or other) nature of man, transcends necessarily the level of the organism alone. It necessitates recognition of an ego, and, hence, a moral stance. (Ego, self, or “I” are “das Ich” in Steiner’s German, not “das Ego,” and denote a concept difficult to translate. Steiner’s notion of self implies a sort of essential and continuing individuality without the abstract connotations of a “thing” that cannot be divided; a self without necessarily implying selfishness or a changeable personality; and an ego in a sense not freighted with Freudian or other psychoanalytic overtones. Some English authors have translated the concept as the “I,” which works in print but is monumentally confusing when spoken because of the homonym “eye”.) Gardner’s argument here mirrors Steiner’s discussion of “ethical individualism” (Steiner 1970) in seeing individualism not as a reduction from a social whole nor as a manifestation of selfishness, but as the possibility of moral choice, choice that might in fact contradict the impositions of “natural” drives and desires.
Part Two of Gardner’s book addresses educational questions of intellect, truth, knowledge, experience and morality. Unlike other essays, in which the philosophical discussion resists touching the ground, Gardner aims here to use the methods of education found in Waldorf schools to illustrate his points. He shows how truth, conceptualized in maturity as intellectual or logical truth, grows first through the activity—especially physical activity—of very young children, and then through the feelings and imaginations of elementary school-age children. Without experiences of truth as action and a feeling for truth, Gardner argues, we will be unlikely as adults to recognize it even intellectually. This three stage description, based on Steiner’s work and Gardner’s observations, finds a clear parallel, for example, in Piaget’s stages of the development of reasoning, his study of genetic epistemology. The term “sensori-motor” accords well with the experience of physical activity that Gardner describes, and Piaget’s stage of “concrete operations” also parallels the manipulation of artistic materials that Waldorf teachers find so valuable in the elementary school. On the other hand, while Piaget was an exacting researcher, his narrow focus neglects, perhaps, the value of behavior and affect, in order to favor the development of cognition. It is worth noting that some American educators have attached ages to Piaget’s stages, something that he himself resisted (see, for example, Crain 1992, pp. 122-134, and Piaget 1965). That is, we could say that Piaget was interested in a precise description of the development of thinking while some later authors have been interested in an educational application, for example. These latter have therefore quantified and simplified Piaget’s work unnecessarily. That Steiner’s rough seven year periods of development do not accord exactly with Piaget’s descriptions hardly matters; the point is that both are describing similar developmental processes, processes that are cumulative and metamorphic. That is, development for both Steiner and Piaget involves “sea changes,” not ladder-like accumulations or accretions.
The title essay of Gardner’s book resides in this central section, and it offers Gardner’s only introduction to the educational methods of Waldorf schools. Gardner emphasizes, for example, “the cognitive power that lies hidden in feeling and will.” (66) He discovers in the cognitive act of learning to read, for example, the necessity for “a vivid experience of the creative, formative powers that lie within language.” (67) We might say that the method used to teach reading hardly matters (whole language v. phonics, eg.) if a child’s imagination and interest are not engaged. (While this reads like a truism, the sterility of “Dick and Jane” readers points to its neglect, at least earlier in the century.)
For a historical consideration of Gardner’s book, the third part is the most instructive. The essays here are mature reflections of “problems of special interest to parents and citizens.” (v) They hew closely to accepted broad principles of Waldorf education in that they are concerned with inspiring genius, developing the possibility of individual freedom, and separating schools from government control as goals for education. They also reflect, however, particularly and often deliberately, concerns of many Americans who perceived political and cultural threats to democracy, individualism and freedom, however conceived, during the Cold War. That is, they stand in clear opposition to, at least, stereotypical conceptions of the threats of Marxist-Leninist socialism: political totalitarianism, cultural indoctrination, and economic communism. Gardner’s arguments are not arguments from the right, however, at least not in the conventional sense. They recognize, for example, that philosophical materialism may underlie both capitalism and communism, and that the Soviet Union and China are not the only nations that might seek to indoctrinate rather than educate their students. In this sense, Gardner’s arguments aim to transcend the Cold War deadlock, while acknowledging it as the foundation of a discourse. In this aim it is surprisingly similar, for example, to that of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. Both Gardner and Solzhenitsyn see a solution to the political and economic standoff of the times in individual transformation. To update their concerns, the world may cheer the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the apparent tensions remain between social responsibility and individual freedom and between reductive materialism and a qualitative, synthetic understanding of the world.
If Gardner’s arguments ring of Emersonian transcendentalism it is no accident. Gardner taught Transcendentalist literature for years, published several lectures on Transcendental writers, and clearly strove, within the form of the essay, for an Emersonian economy of words. His success in this regard was not complete, not that it could be. The essay titled “Authority, Discipline, and Freedom”—here are at least three essays for Emerson, had he wished to tackle subjects so abstract—begins, “Those who dispute about how to educate free men argue the effects of childish obedience upon adult self-reliance, of unquestioning trust and belief in authority during the first school years upon the critical thinking that enables a mature individual later on to steer his way past illusion.” (117) Emerson’s vocabulary and locutions aside, Gardner sets up a debate between Cold War straw men and proceeds to demonstrate how each is only partially correct (and neither is mutually exclusive). Such rhetoric falls short of Emerson’s direct and pithy expression.
On the other hand, in his interest in Emerson—three of ten essays begin by quoting Emerson—Gardner forwards a previous theme of my research, the notion that Waldorf education, taken not as an object but as an expression of a method, derives from influences that predate Steiner. Chief among them for Americans is Emerson.
A second edition of Gardner’s book was published in 1996 under the title Education in Search of Spirit. Despite a note that the new edition has been “revised, updated and expanded,” there are few changes. Some of these few changes, however, are noteworthy. In “Morality and the Experience of Knowledge,” for example, Gardner originally wrote, “The self will out [of its solitary confinement]. Drugs, sex, speed, civil disobedience, and revolution seem to offer ways out; but the trouble with all of them is that their ways are illusory.” (97) In 1996, the same passage reads, “Drugs, sex, speed, and rebellion seem to offer ways out…” (111) Despite similarities, it is easy to read a polemic against the civil unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the first quotation and to catch a recognition of the possible virtues of civil disobedience and revolution in the second. The drama of the times is tempered in retrospect.
In a discussion of “the path of redemption [following the] Fall of Man,” the second edition inserts the phrase, “…whose time must come and has come, if the Fall is not to be final.” (173) Coupled with the addition of the following tortured, pessimistic observation, we read, it seems, the personality change of the author, from active teacher to passive observer:
As the Western world feels the helplessness of its own predominantly material, technological, economic orientation to master soul sickness and social distemper as these are appearing in depression, addictions, criminality, the dissolving of moral values, and the whole tide of destructive behavior afflicting millions of the younger generation—what is to prevent us from being drawn quite out of our orbit?(170)
The foreword to the second edition suggests that, even in Waldorf schools, head and hands suffer the neglect of heart. To remedy this perceived lack, Gardner suggests what he calls the “direct approach” to the spirit (or Spirit; several words are apocalyptically capitalized in the second edition), “intensified wonder, delight, and grateful praise… only spirit finds spirit. … Only the real Self can answer: ‘I truly want…’ ” (14-15) These concepts, that suffer by comparison with the relative clarity of Gardner’s earlier writing, I believe, accord more with Gardner’s late interest in “charismatic Christianity” than they do with Steiner’s work (see Gardner 1992). [N.B.: Some “anthroposophical” literature finds its way to print through vanity presses. Readers unable to locate some of these more obscure volumes to which I refere are directed to the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, NY, a friendly and reliable source.]
In his interests in transcendentalism, the Cold War, and, later, fundamentalist Christianity, Gardner reflects concerns that accord well with the generation of Waldorf schools that I call the American.
Part Two of Gardner’s book addresses educational questions of intellect, truth, knowledge, experience and morality. Unlike other essays, in which the philosophical discussion resists touching the ground, Gardner aims here to use the methods of education found in Waldorf schools to illustrate his points. He shows how truth, conceptualized in maturity as intellectual or logical truth, grows first through the activity—especially physical activity—of very young children, and then through the feelings and imaginations of elementary school-age children. Without experiences of truth as action and a feeling for truth, Gardner argues, we will be unlikely as adults to recognize it even intellectually. This three stage description, based on Steiner’s work and Gardner’s observations, finds a clear parallel, for example, in Piaget’s stages of the development of reasoning, his study of genetic epistemology. The term “sensori-motor” accords well with the experience of physical activity that Gardner describes, and Piaget’s stage of “concrete operations” also parallels the manipulation of artistic materials that Waldorf teachers find so valuable in the elementary school. On the other hand, while Piaget was an exacting researcher, his narrow focus neglects, perhaps, the value of behavior and affect, in order to favor the development of cognition. It is worth noting that some American educators have attached ages to Piaget’s stages, something that he himself resisted (see, for example, Crain 1992, pp. 122-134, and Piaget 1965). That is, we could say that Piaget was interested in a precise description of the development of thinking while some later authors have been interested in an educational application, for example. These latter have therefore quantified and simplified Piaget’s work unnecessarily. That Steiner’s rough seven year periods of development do not accord exactly with Piaget’s descriptions hardly matters; the point is that both are describing similar developmental processes, processes that are cumulative and metamorphic. That is, development for both Steiner and Piaget involves “sea changes,” not ladder-like accumulations or accretions.
The title essay of Gardner’s book resides in this central section, and it offers Gardner’s only introduction to the educational methods of Waldorf schools. Gardner emphasizes, for example, “the cognitive power that lies hidden in feeling and will.” (66) He discovers in the cognitive act of learning to read, for example, the necessity for “a vivid experience of the creative, formative powers that lie within language.” (67) We might say that the method used to teach reading hardly matters (whole language v. phonics, eg.) if a child’s imagination and interest are not engaged. (While this reads like a truism, the sterility of “Dick and Jane” readers points to its neglect, at least earlier in the century.)
For a historical consideration of Gardner’s book, the third part is the most instructive. The essays here are mature reflections of “problems of special interest to parents and citizens.” (v) They hew closely to accepted broad principles of Waldorf education in that they are concerned with inspiring genius, developing the possibility of individual freedom, and separating schools from government control as goals for education. They also reflect, however, particularly and often deliberately, concerns of many Americans who perceived political and cultural threats to democracy, individualism and freedom, however conceived, during the Cold War. That is, they stand in clear opposition to, at least, stereotypical conceptions of the threats of Marxist-Leninist socialism: political totalitarianism, cultural indoctrination, and economic communism. Gardner’s arguments are not arguments from the right, however, at least not in the conventional sense. They recognize, for example, that philosophical materialism may underlie both capitalism and communism, and that the Soviet Union and China are not the only nations that might seek to indoctrinate rather than educate their students. In this sense, Gardner’s arguments aim to transcend the Cold War deadlock, while acknowledging it as the foundation of a discourse. In this aim it is surprisingly similar, for example, to that of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. Both Gardner and Solzhenitsyn see a solution to the political and economic standoff of the times in individual transformation. To update their concerns, the world may cheer the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but the apparent tensions remain between social responsibility and individual freedom and between reductive materialism and a qualitative, synthetic understanding of the world.
If Gardner’s arguments ring of Emersonian transcendentalism it is no accident. Gardner taught Transcendentalist literature for years, published several lectures on Transcendental writers, and clearly strove, within the form of the essay, for an Emersonian economy of words. His success in this regard was not complete, not that it could be. The essay titled “Authority, Discipline, and Freedom”—here are at least three essays for Emerson, had he wished to tackle subjects so abstract—begins, “Those who dispute about how to educate free men argue the effects of childish obedience upon adult self-reliance, of unquestioning trust and belief in authority during the first school years upon the critical thinking that enables a mature individual later on to steer his way past illusion.” (117) Emerson’s vocabulary and locutions aside, Gardner sets up a debate between Cold War straw men and proceeds to demonstrate how each is only partially correct (and neither is mutually exclusive). Such rhetoric falls short of Emerson’s direct and pithy expression.
On the other hand, in his interest in Emerson—three of ten essays begin by quoting Emerson—Gardner forwards a previous theme of my research, the notion that Waldorf education, taken not as an object but as an expression of a method, derives from influences that predate Steiner. Chief among them for Americans is Emerson.
A second edition of Gardner’s book was published in 1996 under the title Education in Search of Spirit. Despite a note that the new edition has been “revised, updated and expanded,” there are few changes. Some of these few changes, however, are noteworthy. In “Morality and the Experience of Knowledge,” for example, Gardner originally wrote, “The self will out [of its solitary confinement]. Drugs, sex, speed, civil disobedience, and revolution seem to offer ways out; but the trouble with all of them is that their ways are illusory.” (97) In 1996, the same passage reads, “Drugs, sex, speed, and rebellion seem to offer ways out…” (111) Despite similarities, it is easy to read a polemic against the civil unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the first quotation and to catch a recognition of the possible virtues of civil disobedience and revolution in the second. The drama of the times is tempered in retrospect.
In a discussion of “the path of redemption [following the] Fall of Man,” the second edition inserts the phrase, “…whose time must come and has come, if the Fall is not to be final.” (173) Coupled with the addition of the following tortured, pessimistic observation, we read, it seems, the personality change of the author, from active teacher to passive observer:
As the Western world feels the helplessness of its own predominantly material, technological, economic orientation to master soul sickness and social distemper as these are appearing in depression, addictions, criminality, the dissolving of moral values, and the whole tide of destructive behavior afflicting millions of the younger generation—what is to prevent us from being drawn quite out of our orbit?(170)
The foreword to the second edition suggests that, even in Waldorf schools, head and hands suffer the neglect of heart. To remedy this perceived lack, Gardner suggests what he calls the “direct approach” to the spirit (or Spirit; several words are apocalyptically capitalized in the second edition), “intensified wonder, delight, and grateful praise… only spirit finds spirit. … Only the real Self can answer: ‘I truly want…’ ” (14-15) These concepts, that suffer by comparison with the relative clarity of Gardner’s earlier writing, I believe, accord more with Gardner’s late interest in “charismatic Christianity” than they do with Steiner’s work (see Gardner 1992). [N.B.: Some “anthroposophical” literature finds its way to print through vanity presses. Readers unable to locate some of these more obscure volumes to which I refere are directed to the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, NY, a friendly and reliable source.]
In his interests in transcendentalism, the Cold War, and, later, fundamentalist Christianity, Gardner reflects concerns that accord well with the generation of Waldorf schools that I call the American.
Representations of Waldorf Education II: The Creation of Waldorf Education
I have called the object of my study here “Waldorf education”, but history shows that even that term, well accepted today, came into being only gradually. A. C. Harwood’s title and index do not contain the word “Waldorf,” he does not use the phrase “Waldorf education” at all, and he refers only infrequently to “Waldorf schools”, and then only as representing or modeling the “educational work” or “philosophy” of Rudolf Steiner. I enclose the term philosophy in scare quotes because of my conviction that Steiner’s work does not constitute primarily a philosophy, but a methodology. Steiner deals with epistemological and ontological questions, for example, (see especially Philosophy of Freedom 1970) but his primary concern is the attainment of knowledge, not that knowledge itself, and a description of being, not a theory of it.
John Gardner does not examine this point explicitly, but he does refer primarily to Steiner’s “educational method.” He refers to Waldorf schools and Waldorf education only in the central essay of the book, “The Experience of Knowledge,” the single essay in which he is at pains to view Waldorf schools as models for the implementations of Steiner’s method. The connotation here, different from the present as we shall see, is that Steiner’s method is not synonymous with the existence of education or schools that call themselves “Waldorf.” In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” (1996), Gardner himself employs the word “Waldorf” in quotation marks. “I believe strongly in the excellence and soundness of the new insights that stand behind the ‘Waldorf’ impulse in education; but I am less than enthusiastic about accepting the name generally used to designate this impulse, for it gives no clue as to what the new beginning actually intends or involves,” he continues (12-13). Gardner would likely have agreed that any teacher and any school could, with good will, employ the model we have come to know as Waldorf education. (Cf. Emmet, B. (undated) From Farm to School: The Founding of the High Mowing School).
M. C. Richards objectifies Waldorf education far more than these first two authors do. She refers to “Rudolf Steiner Education,” “Waldorf Education,” and “Waldorf schooling” interchangeably. Her tacit assumption, one that she represents in her generation, is that Waldorf education, the curriculum, principles and practices of Waldorf schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, have a kind of concrete reality that is missing from considerations of earlier authors. The subtle irony here is that her commitment to “become undivisive in our science, our emotions, our creativity—to live in the paradox of separateness and connection…” (156) is initially undermined by her acceptance of the objective existence of something called Waldorf education.
By 1999, Eugene Schwartz’ index contains the following entries: Waldorf approach, Waldorf education, Waldorf high school, Waldorf kindergarten, Waldorf kindergarten playground, Waldorf main lesson, Waldorf method, Waldorf nursery teachers, Waldorf Room [sic], Waldorf school pupils, Waldorf schools, and Waldorf teachers. The process of objectification, clearly, does not end with the creation of one object, but threatens to continue indefinitely. Continued ad absurdam, the process would produce a “separate but equal” parallel “Waldorf” universe. Schwartz, of course, is not responsible for this onslaught of terminology; his vocabulary is simply the one available to him, and the points he examines concern other aspects of education (see below).
The objectification of Waldorf education is not an inherently reprehensible process. It eases discussion of important issues in education and creates a core around which communities of teachers, students, parents and others may form. Although I raise the issue here, I have also relied on the term throughout this work. On the other hand, carried too far, objectification threatens to dichotomize an idea that, at least initially, opposed such a split. Discussion of Waldorf education, once created as an object, then poses itself “against” other forms of education, forms that must themselves be objectified even to be allowed into the discussion. Further, communities gathered around such an unquestioned, objectified idea may become insular. This process traces the rise of a fundamentalism to which Waldorf communities are certainly not immune. In a small way, the separation of “Waldorf” ideas about teaching and learning from more conventional or accepted ideas mirrors, for example, the separation of Protestantism from Catholicism in the 16th century.
I have traced this process of objectification briefly with reference to a few books, but these are simply symptomatic of a wider process. The creation of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), also exemplifies this process. The Association began with informal conferences of about a dozen Waldorf schools in the mid-1960s and continued through a formal incorporation around 1980. (I have been unable to ascertain the exact year of the founding of AWSNA.) Since then, the Association has trademarked the name “Waldorf” as it applies to education in the United States, categorized schools by affiliation status, decided that public schools cannot be Waldorf schools, and, most recently, become an accrediting body for Waldorf schools. This gradual institutionalization, necessary or helpful as it may have been to those involved, also charts the development of an exclusive educational precipitate, “Waldorf schools.”
As Waldorf education became more established in the United States, its promise as a model for education generally was compromised, in part, by its objectification. By coming to reside, or to be seen to reside, in specific schools only, it forsook its status as a way to discuss how teachers teach and children learn, and became much more than that; an exclusive culture and institution. This process may be traced through the books that I will now examine in more detail.
Before I proceed to the books themselves, however, I should point out three things. First, although the Steiner School in New York City opened in 1928, I am unaware of any book-length considered descriptive works in English on Waldorf education—separate from translations of Steiner’s works—before Edmund’s of 1947 and Harwood’s of 1958. This may reflect two characteristics of early practice: A thorough engagement with Steiner’s work itself, especially including the translation of German material into English, and an active struggle in the few small schools and classrooms to survive from day to day and year to year, a struggle that left little time or energy for book-length reflections.
Second, especially because each of the books I will examine is born of experience, not, for example, of theorizing, agenda-setting, or policy-making, each book represents a culmination of life in a school or of thinking about education. For example, John Gardner’s book was published in 1975, the year he retired after twenty-five years as Faculty Chair of the Waldorf School of Garden City. It is not a state-of-the-art examination, but a reflection of roughly the years 1950-1975. This point may seem obvious, but it points to the value of the books I will examine as historical artifacts. Each is a “summing up” of years prior to publication.
Third, although each successive author almost definitely knew of those preceding him or her, the later of these works contain few references to the others’ books (M. C. Richards refers readers to Harwood’s book once, and Eugene Schwartz acknowledges a couple of contributions from John Gardner, but they seem to refer to personal conversations and not to published work). This is odd given the very few works that aim at any sort of general description of Waldorf education, but may be understandable given the changing needs for a general work. Rather than sources or influences (or opportunities for rebuttal), previous works may simply be so much ink under the printing press, so to speak.
John Gardner does not examine this point explicitly, but he does refer primarily to Steiner’s “educational method.” He refers to Waldorf schools and Waldorf education only in the central essay of the book, “The Experience of Knowledge,” the single essay in which he is at pains to view Waldorf schools as models for the implementations of Steiner’s method. The connotation here, different from the present as we shall see, is that Steiner’s method is not synonymous with the existence of education or schools that call themselves “Waldorf.” In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” (1996), Gardner himself employs the word “Waldorf” in quotation marks. “I believe strongly in the excellence and soundness of the new insights that stand behind the ‘Waldorf’ impulse in education; but I am less than enthusiastic about accepting the name generally used to designate this impulse, for it gives no clue as to what the new beginning actually intends or involves,” he continues (12-13). Gardner would likely have agreed that any teacher and any school could, with good will, employ the model we have come to know as Waldorf education. (Cf. Emmet, B. (undated) From Farm to School: The Founding of the High Mowing School).
M. C. Richards objectifies Waldorf education far more than these first two authors do. She refers to “Rudolf Steiner Education,” “Waldorf Education,” and “Waldorf schooling” interchangeably. Her tacit assumption, one that she represents in her generation, is that Waldorf education, the curriculum, principles and practices of Waldorf schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, have a kind of concrete reality that is missing from considerations of earlier authors. The subtle irony here is that her commitment to “become undivisive in our science, our emotions, our creativity—to live in the paradox of separateness and connection…” (156) is initially undermined by her acceptance of the objective existence of something called Waldorf education.
By 1999, Eugene Schwartz’ index contains the following entries: Waldorf approach, Waldorf education, Waldorf high school, Waldorf kindergarten, Waldorf kindergarten playground, Waldorf main lesson, Waldorf method, Waldorf nursery teachers, Waldorf Room [sic], Waldorf school pupils, Waldorf schools, and Waldorf teachers. The process of objectification, clearly, does not end with the creation of one object, but threatens to continue indefinitely. Continued ad absurdam, the process would produce a “separate but equal” parallel “Waldorf” universe. Schwartz, of course, is not responsible for this onslaught of terminology; his vocabulary is simply the one available to him, and the points he examines concern other aspects of education (see below).
The objectification of Waldorf education is not an inherently reprehensible process. It eases discussion of important issues in education and creates a core around which communities of teachers, students, parents and others may form. Although I raise the issue here, I have also relied on the term throughout this work. On the other hand, carried too far, objectification threatens to dichotomize an idea that, at least initially, opposed such a split. Discussion of Waldorf education, once created as an object, then poses itself “against” other forms of education, forms that must themselves be objectified even to be allowed into the discussion. Further, communities gathered around such an unquestioned, objectified idea may become insular. This process traces the rise of a fundamentalism to which Waldorf communities are certainly not immune. In a small way, the separation of “Waldorf” ideas about teaching and learning from more conventional or accepted ideas mirrors, for example, the separation of Protestantism from Catholicism in the 16th century.
I have traced this process of objectification briefly with reference to a few books, but these are simply symptomatic of a wider process. The creation of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), also exemplifies this process. The Association began with informal conferences of about a dozen Waldorf schools in the mid-1960s and continued through a formal incorporation around 1980. (I have been unable to ascertain the exact year of the founding of AWSNA.) Since then, the Association has trademarked the name “Waldorf” as it applies to education in the United States, categorized schools by affiliation status, decided that public schools cannot be Waldorf schools, and, most recently, become an accrediting body for Waldorf schools. This gradual institutionalization, necessary or helpful as it may have been to those involved, also charts the development of an exclusive educational precipitate, “Waldorf schools.”
As Waldorf education became more established in the United States, its promise as a model for education generally was compromised, in part, by its objectification. By coming to reside, or to be seen to reside, in specific schools only, it forsook its status as a way to discuss how teachers teach and children learn, and became much more than that; an exclusive culture and institution. This process may be traced through the books that I will now examine in more detail.
Before I proceed to the books themselves, however, I should point out three things. First, although the Steiner School in New York City opened in 1928, I am unaware of any book-length considered descriptive works in English on Waldorf education—separate from translations of Steiner’s works—before Edmund’s of 1947 and Harwood’s of 1958. This may reflect two characteristics of early practice: A thorough engagement with Steiner’s work itself, especially including the translation of German material into English, and an active struggle in the few small schools and classrooms to survive from day to day and year to year, a struggle that left little time or energy for book-length reflections.
Second, especially because each of the books I will examine is born of experience, not, for example, of theorizing, agenda-setting, or policy-making, each book represents a culmination of life in a school or of thinking about education. For example, John Gardner’s book was published in 1975, the year he retired after twenty-five years as Faculty Chair of the Waldorf School of Garden City. It is not a state-of-the-art examination, but a reflection of roughly the years 1950-1975. This point may seem obvious, but it points to the value of the books I will examine as historical artifacts. Each is a “summing up” of years prior to publication.
Third, although each successive author almost definitely knew of those preceding him or her, the later of these works contain few references to the others’ books (M. C. Richards refers readers to Harwood’s book once, and Eugene Schwartz acknowledges a couple of contributions from John Gardner, but they seem to refer to personal conversations and not to published work). This is odd given the very few works that aim at any sort of general description of Waldorf education, but may be understandable given the changing needs for a general work. Rather than sources or influences (or opportunities for rebuttal), previous works may simply be so much ink under the printing press, so to speak.
Representations of Waldorf Education I: Four Books, Four Generations
NOTE: This post is more than 8000 words, so I have posted it in 8 sections.
In chronological order, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner (Harwood 1958), The Experience of Knowledge: Essays on American Education (Gardner 1975), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Richards 1980), and Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century (Schwartz 1999), represent four distinct phases or generations of Waldorf education in the United States. I have chosen to call these generations: 1.) Europeans; 2.) Americans; 3.) Alternatives; and 4.) Variations. (Regarding the inadequacy of the name of the latest generation, any history that attempts to approach the present will necessarily stumble as it nears its goal. I leave it to the future to rename appropriately the contemporary generation when—or if—its character becomes clear. Also, it seems to me, attempts to categorize many things leave a last category, “other”, that serves to demonstrate the ultimate inadequacy of categorizations such as I have undertaken here. This does not contradict the value or utility of taking a stab at it nonetheless.)
These generations mirror closely, although this occurred to me years after first conceiving of them, the generalized generations of historians described as “conflict,” “consensus,” and “plural.” Very simply, many historians, led perhaps by Charles Beard (1913/1986), largely before the Second World War, saw historical change growing out of class conflicts as well as political theory. Even the small presence of Waldorf schools in the United States before World War II shows evidence of this conflict view in the struggle to translate a European, especially German, working-class education for, especially, a New York Upper East Side clientele. Consensus historians, largely after World War II, emphasized common purpose in the movement of history, describing the Continental Congress as, in John P. Roche’s phrase, a “reform caucus,” for example (in Higham 1962). Similarly, having found a more or less secure footing in the U.S., those who thought about Waldorf education after the War described it, for example, as offering a balance to the pendulum swings between traditional and progressive modes of education. (see Gardner 1975). The “new” pluralistic history abjures large-scale syntheses and throws the field open to a multi-faceted approach that includes history “from the bottom up” and consideration of previously marginalized groups (see, among others, Lemsich 1968). And during this period, from the mid-1960s on, Waldorf schools began increasingly to portray themselves not as fellow-travelers in search of educational answers, but as (self-) marginalized institutions themselves. Recently, since 1990 or so, hard to characterize briefly, Waldorf teachers and schools find themselves examining issues from the role of Waldorf education in public school systems and juvenile corrections to the separation of church (and school) and state. (See, for example, Smith, undated, and Oppenheimer 1999.)
The ease with which Waldorf generations may be shoehorned into a simple historiography suggests two things: First, that changes in historical interpretation must themselves be historicized to consider how the practice of history reflects broader contemporaneous social concerns; and, second, that the fit between my object of study and this view of historical interpretation probably calls the simplicity of that historiography into question more than it validates my descriptions.
The books I examine here do not constitute a canon in the literature of Waldorf education; rather, they are among the few works that attempt to portray Waldorf education generally for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with it. Three more works that might be included here but are not, for example, are Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf Impulse (Edmunds 1947), Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Easton 1975), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Sloan 1983). Edmunds’ work, although it appeared originally a decade before Harwood’s, is largely superceded by Harwood’s more thorough investigation. The works of Easton and Sloan largely regard topics other than Waldorf education, although each book contains a chapter or an extensive appendix on Waldorf education.
Further, a large and growing body of literature examines or extends aspects of Waldorf practices, curricula and methodologies, but works in this mode usually assume some familiarity with Waldorf education itself, familiarity that can be gained through Steiner’s work, experience in Waldorf schools, or the more primary texts examined here. Although these works as well might be examined to tease out the historical context in which they were written, to do so would likely not add much to the discussion I will begin here.
Although the generations I will describe are gross generalizations, they represent both a chronological progression and changing views of the promises and compromises, the possibilities, tensions and unsettled questions, entailed by the effort to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for a United States clientele.
Teachers wrote all the books examined here, although not all were teachers in Waldorf schools, (M. C. Richards taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for example) and they attempt to examine or characterize education broadly. They may describe classroom experience and practice, but their goal is to address educational questions beyond simple descriptions of Steiner’s ideas in practice. As these questions change—from a seemingly simple first comprehensive English introduction to Steiner’s ideas, through an Emersonian examination of fundamental questions of the meanings of education in the assumed context of the Cold War and a re-casting of Waldorf education as an educational form that mirrors the growing New Age, to an indictment of misapplications of child psychology in education, for example—a history emerges that shows Waldorf education changing in changing contexts. Waldorf education appears, then, not as a monolithic tablet on which the answers to an educational debate are inscribed, but as a responsive partner in a dialogue. Admittedly, this partner has been virtually silent in the United States for the past seventy years or so, but no less thoughtful or observant for that. Further, even the term “Waldorf education” has its own history.
In chronological order, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner (Harwood 1958), The Experience of Knowledge: Essays on American Education (Gardner 1975), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Richards 1980), and Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century (Schwartz 1999), represent four distinct phases or generations of Waldorf education in the United States. I have chosen to call these generations: 1.) Europeans; 2.) Americans; 3.) Alternatives; and 4.) Variations. (Regarding the inadequacy of the name of the latest generation, any history that attempts to approach the present will necessarily stumble as it nears its goal. I leave it to the future to rename appropriately the contemporary generation when—or if—its character becomes clear. Also, it seems to me, attempts to categorize many things leave a last category, “other”, that serves to demonstrate the ultimate inadequacy of categorizations such as I have undertaken here. This does not contradict the value or utility of taking a stab at it nonetheless.)
These generations mirror closely, although this occurred to me years after first conceiving of them, the generalized generations of historians described as “conflict,” “consensus,” and “plural.” Very simply, many historians, led perhaps by Charles Beard (1913/1986), largely before the Second World War, saw historical change growing out of class conflicts as well as political theory. Even the small presence of Waldorf schools in the United States before World War II shows evidence of this conflict view in the struggle to translate a European, especially German, working-class education for, especially, a New York Upper East Side clientele. Consensus historians, largely after World War II, emphasized common purpose in the movement of history, describing the Continental Congress as, in John P. Roche’s phrase, a “reform caucus,” for example (in Higham 1962). Similarly, having found a more or less secure footing in the U.S., those who thought about Waldorf education after the War described it, for example, as offering a balance to the pendulum swings between traditional and progressive modes of education. (see Gardner 1975). The “new” pluralistic history abjures large-scale syntheses and throws the field open to a multi-faceted approach that includes history “from the bottom up” and consideration of previously marginalized groups (see, among others, Lemsich 1968). And during this period, from the mid-1960s on, Waldorf schools began increasingly to portray themselves not as fellow-travelers in search of educational answers, but as (self-) marginalized institutions themselves. Recently, since 1990 or so, hard to characterize briefly, Waldorf teachers and schools find themselves examining issues from the role of Waldorf education in public school systems and juvenile corrections to the separation of church (and school) and state. (See, for example, Smith, undated, and Oppenheimer 1999.)
The ease with which Waldorf generations may be shoehorned into a simple historiography suggests two things: First, that changes in historical interpretation must themselves be historicized to consider how the practice of history reflects broader contemporaneous social concerns; and, second, that the fit between my object of study and this view of historical interpretation probably calls the simplicity of that historiography into question more than it validates my descriptions.
The books I examine here do not constitute a canon in the literature of Waldorf education; rather, they are among the few works that attempt to portray Waldorf education generally for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with it. Three more works that might be included here but are not, for example, are Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf Impulse (Edmunds 1947), Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Easton 1975), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Sloan 1983). Edmunds’ work, although it appeared originally a decade before Harwood’s, is largely superceded by Harwood’s more thorough investigation. The works of Easton and Sloan largely regard topics other than Waldorf education, although each book contains a chapter or an extensive appendix on Waldorf education.
Further, a large and growing body of literature examines or extends aspects of Waldorf practices, curricula and methodologies, but works in this mode usually assume some familiarity with Waldorf education itself, familiarity that can be gained through Steiner’s work, experience in Waldorf schools, or the more primary texts examined here. Although these works as well might be examined to tease out the historical context in which they were written, to do so would likely not add much to the discussion I will begin here.
Although the generations I will describe are gross generalizations, they represent both a chronological progression and changing views of the promises and compromises, the possibilities, tensions and unsettled questions, entailed by the effort to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for a United States clientele.
Teachers wrote all the books examined here, although not all were teachers in Waldorf schools, (M. C. Richards taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for example) and they attempt to examine or characterize education broadly. They may describe classroom experience and practice, but their goal is to address educational questions beyond simple descriptions of Steiner’s ideas in practice. As these questions change—from a seemingly simple first comprehensive English introduction to Steiner’s ideas, through an Emersonian examination of fundamental questions of the meanings of education in the assumed context of the Cold War and a re-casting of Waldorf education as an educational form that mirrors the growing New Age, to an indictment of misapplications of child psychology in education, for example—a history emerges that shows Waldorf education changing in changing contexts. Waldorf education appears, then, not as a monolithic tablet on which the answers to an educational debate are inscribed, but as a responsive partner in a dialogue. Admittedly, this partner has been virtually silent in the United States for the past seventy years or so, but no less thoughtful or observant for that. Further, even the term “Waldorf education” has its own history.
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