U.S. History in a Nutshell

When ranchers and rangers drove a large, closed General Motors/Chevrolet vehicle based on a truck chassis, the vehicle was called a "Suburban." As soon as actual suburban moms and dads started driving the same vehicle, its name was changed to the range-friendly "Yukon XL." Fantasy becomes reality becomes fantasy. U.S. history in a nutshell.

Please send other pithy illustrations of our great nation in fantastic action. What about us tickles you?

Don’t Look Now—Psychopathic Tendencies in (Educational) Technology

Imagine a perfectly rational, logical person, one with a perfect memory, but one who has no emotions.

Scary, huh? Sort of a psychopath? Yet we have spent countless hours and sums over the past century or so developing a machine that embodies exactly this fantasy, and many of us now spend hours each day interacting with these devices—perfect logic, perfect memory, and no emotions. In fact… don’t turn around… you’re probably reading this on one right now.

Real psychopaths have a will of their own and present obvious danger to those around them. Machines represent the will of their creators and users, and so computers—fortunately—act only as psychopaths in the movies (2001, A Space Odyssey) or in the hands of actual psychopaths. (Whether or not a device with latent psychopathic tendencies magnifies psychopathic tendencies in each of us would be an interesting area of study.)

Further, as Joseph Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason) and others have pointed out, tools are not merely the embodiments of instrumental reason. (Instrumental reason, you could say, arises when we generalize the values of technology to all values.) Tools embody the values of their creators and they become part of the human world in which they are used—once created, they become part of the way we picture the world and our role in that world.

Consequently, as Weizenbaum also points out, all technology is educational—one function of education is cultural transmission, and technology is intimately bound up with any culture.

Once upon a time, a human being grabbed a rock and used it as a hammer. She may have put it down, looked around, and thought, “Gee, I never realized how many hammers are lying around here.” Technology begins—and ends—not with devices external to us, but in our own minds and in our perceptions of the world.

Further, in the long run, the devices we create may replace an older version of the world with a new version in which the values of the device may be mistaken for reality itself. A simple instance will suffice. Experience used to be seamless and whole, one with the rhythms of nature—sunrise, sunset, the cycle of the moon, the seasons. Eventually, European monks decided to build a mechanical bell ringer to remind them of the time to pray. This precursor of our modern clocks (from the French cloche, bell) had no face and simply established a mechanical rhythm, roughly correlated with the times during the day and night when a bell should ring to call the monks to prayer.

Over the past 800 years, we have so internalized and enhanced the mechanism of the clock that most of us would agree that clocks “measure time.” A moment’s reflection will show that they do no such thing. What do they do? Like a metronome, they establish a mechanical rhythm. That’s all. Any interpretation of time with regard to the rhythm of the device belongs to us, although we have largely forgotten this.

Clocks, then, despite their obvious advantages, have also served to mechanize, standardize, and fragment our experience of time.

(Similarly, the moveable type printing press mechanized, standardized, and fragmented our experience of texts.)

Leaping ahead, we may say that computers, because of their astonishing malleability—what do you want the computer to do? We’ll program it to make it do that—don’t simply introduce psychotic rationalism to one portion of reality—say, our experience of time or of a text—they co-opt, rationalize and standardize experience itself. The experience of the computer is the illusion of experience.

Now, Jill or Johnny, I want you to go upstairs and don’t come down until you’ve spent at least one hour doing your homework on your psychopath.

Teaching 8th grade history in a Waldorf school in a nutshell…

I produced the following BRIEF outline for my adult students. I have others on other grades that I'll post soon. Hope it's helpful to some; if it's not, ignore it!

Tell stories of cultural changes—in the arts, science and technology—from 1600 to the present. This focuses on the Industrial Revolution and Romanticism (which, of course, should be considered not only as an anti-industrial response, but as the seed of everything from the environmental movement to anthroposophy, not that you’ll tell the students this—see Barfield’s “Romanticism Come of Age.”)

NOTE: Many schools call this a “Revolutions” block and focus also on the American, French, and even Soviet Revolutions. This is fine, but this topic can also wait for 9th grade. (I believe that because many Waldorf schools do not have high schools, they seek to push some high school material—especially cultural history—into the 8th grade curriculum. This may not be a bad thing.)

NOTE: Many schools teach U.S. history in 8th grade. If this is done according to the theme of “human transformation of the world”—the inner world of human consciousness and, more important for 8th graders, the outer world of politics, economy, and technology—and not as “mere” U.S. history, then this is fine (but not an ideological necessity). From this point of view—the cultural—wars are less important than they would be from a different point of view.

Depending on the direction you choose you will have an endless supply of fascinating biographies from which to choose (and you can create a longer list from which students may choose projects). Because you have honed your techniques in teaching history in grades 5, 6, and 7, the practice of using human lives to narrate events and illustrate themes will come easily to you. Whittle down the number of lives with which you will contend and don’t belabor any too much (presentation and review for each; no need to spend days and days on John and Abigail Adams, for goodness sake; but, if you love John and Abigail Adams, then have at it).

The lives of inventors and industrialists point to the themes of urbanization, industrialization, transportation, and communication. The world moves rapidly from a perennial simplicity to the acceleration we experience today (Henry Adams, tongue in cheek, saw such an acceleration in human use of energy that he predicted the end of the world in 1926. He was right.) But be on the lookout for the quirks and foibles of your characters (the quirky, foible-full eighth graders love them)—James Watt was so terrified of steam power that he never built an industrial steam engine—he worked on table-top models.

Revolutions, again, point to a larger question about teaching history to youth in general. Life has always been brutal (nasty, brutish and short, in Hobbes’s formulation), from ancient slaughter through torture to modern genocide and holocaust. You can easily acknowledge this—and other forms of human suffering, as in the story of Buddha—without indulging it. Please choose biographies that inspire by example, and mention brutality matter-of-factly in passing. An experienced teacher I know assigned Schindler’s List as a class reader in 8th grade; I believe this is wrong—not that individual 8th graders won’t pick up such books on their own, or that students shouldn’t read exactly this in a few years—because we shouldn’t expose students to the brutality of human existence before they can contend with it in their own emotional lives. To ask them to do so stunts their inner growth, and may—in the presence of other life-factors—express itself in unhealthy, risky behaviors like cutting, drug abuse, or eating disorders.

Main Lesson or Seminar Teaching in a Waldorf School (...or Anywhere You Care to Teach)

Waldorf schools begin each day with what has come to be called a “main lesson”—an unfortunate term in that it subtly denigrates all the other classes of the day, although this was not Rudolf Steiner’s intention.

The high school at which I teach calls these classes “seminars” because that’s descriptive of the way we teach them, it doesn’t connote elementary education, and it doesn’t denigrate other classes.

Many of the ideas and practices recorded here have evolved over my twenty-six years of teaching; what seems simple and obvious to me now in some cases took more than ten years to become so. But slow learning is better than none at all, and it is sometimes deeper than faster learning.

I wrote the following for my teacher education students, and I share it here for the reason I initially started this blog—to provide access to things I had written for which I occasionally get requests. It saves time if they’re here to read or copy—no offprints or email attachments. This document presents main lesson primarily as a middle school history teacher might approach it because the course in which I present it is Teaching History in a Waldorf School, Grades 5-8. Teachers of other grades and other subjects will make their own adjustments.

Finally, I refer in here to doodling and to note-taking, both of which I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

Business
I begin by calling the class to order and getting business out of the way—announcements, attendance, and so forth. To say the morning verse before this—as I once did—now strikes me as bizarre. The verse prepares us to learn. So why prepare to learn and then spend ten minutes on trivial matters?

Morning Verse
Once business is accomplished, I usually say the verse with my class, although, given that many of them often arrive half asleep and malnourished, I sometimes ask them to walk or run around the school building (I used to teach in a room that had a running track just outside the back door, and a lap around this—even if calmly walked—usually brought the students back to me calmer and more alert). Then we say the verse together.

I ask politely for quiet before we begin. I never insist that students say the verse, only that they are quiet and respectful to those who do. If necessary, if no one chooses to say it, I say it myself and students listen. That’s fine. It happens perhaps once with a new group, but usually not again.

I also usually ask a student to begin the verse. If I begin it every morning, I am the one with initiative, my voice is heard, and I may be the only one who utters the word “I” that begins the verse—students joining gradually, “…into the world,” leaving off the “I look.” There are other ways to accomplish this—through regimentation and discipline—but I’ve chosen this different way. I believe this practice is fine to use with students beginning in roughly sixth grade. Before this, I wouldn’t call on their “I” so much.

For Middle School Only
After the verse, perhaps 10 minutes of singing, recorder playing, or speech. I don’t do “mental math” unless we are in a math block. If I did happen to decide to do it, I wouldn’t do it on the same day as recorder or singing or anything else. I don’t find anything about “circle time” in Steiner’s work, and I believe that his request for economy in teaching asks me to get on with my history lesson. (Math requires extra practice, it’s true, but this can be scheduled at a different point in the day, not during main lesson.) In high school classes, I don’t even do any of this, but proceed right to the lesson.

Main Lesson or Seminar
First review (feeling, judgment, discussion), then new material (thinking—but warm and interested thinking), then, if time remains (which I believe it should in middle school, perhaps less in high school), work (will).

Review
The review has three functions. The first is to come to some judgment, conclusion, or opinion regarding the material of the previous day (or previous days; there are clearly times when a “summing up” involves matter learned over several days—observing the changes in form and feeling as we pass from Egyptian through archaic Greek to classical Greek postures in sculpture, for example). This may take five minutes, and it may take nearly an hour. It’s good for me to have a plan for the day, but I am almost always willing to stray from it if student questions (legitimate questions) ask for a longer discussion or review.

A more mundane function of the review is to give notes from the day before, which I put on the board and then answer questions while students copy them. I developed this technique as I became increasingly aware of the strangeness of the process of asking students to pay careful attention to what I am saying while also remembering and writing down what I just said fifteen seconds ago. This splitting of consciousness, I believe, works against actual learning (it’s a necessary skill in college, but can be developed quickly late in high school). By giving notes the day after a presentation, we cover the material twice, and students can listen without interruption to new material.

The third function of the review is to address a question with which I have left the class on the previous day (see below). Again, doing this may take a couple of sentences, shedding a little light in the darkness, or it may yield a full-blown discussion.

(Steiner: “When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person.

When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

New Material
Following the review, I present new material. I ask students to listen quietly. I ask them NOT to take notes (see review above).* I ask them to hold all questions, and to jot down any questions while I am speaking in order to ask them at the end of my presentation (which my students have taken to calling “Story Time with Steve”). Student questions can turn a twenty minute story into an hour’s drudgery as they ask about what I was just about to address, or they ask interesting but digressive questions. I resolve not to digress too much or to interrupt myself during this time, too. Unless behavior absolutely requires it, I won’t stop the class for an elbow bump or a giggle. The start-stop of “regular” discipline can lead to greater chaos than overlooking small slights. If necessary, I can make a note and address it later. If I can and need to, I can calmly walk over to a student without breaking my speech and turn him around, or remove a note from her hand, or otherwise indicate that a behavior is unnecessary.

I allow students to doodle, to knit, or otherwise to quietly, privately occupy their hands. I fought this for more than ten years before I awoke to the fact that I had been a good, attentive student my entire life, through graduate school, and had doodled incessantly, despite all attempts to make me stop. As long as my students are listening and not distracting each other, their quiet activity doesn’t bother me.**

A history presentation involves four basic elements:
1. Creating distance in time, a sense of time;
2. Creating a sense of space—how far is it from here to there; how would you travel in those times? And of place—what is the geography, how would someone living then experience it, how did it influence these people? What is the climate?
3. Creating a sense of character—what we often call “biography,” although really I’m simply telling stories of different lives (birth dates, father’s occupation, and other such trivia are usually inconsequential and the students and I know it; or these things can be included easily in notes on the following day if it is necessary to have some record of them).
4. And creating a sense of an event or happening. Any more than this is unnecessary in middle school, and much more than this is not even necessary in high school; discussions bring out 5. the larger themes—I don’t “teach” them, we discover them in conversation, usually in review. (See Steiner’s work for specific indications for themes and topics for each year, including approaches to history in high school years.)

(Steiner: “Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

Questions
Following story time, I ask for questions. Sometimes there are none; students bask in what they have just heard. Other times, I haven’t said what I thought I said, or been heard as I meant to be heard, and I have to explain or present something again. I generally try to answer all questions, but, if necessary, I end the section by promising to answer questions privately or address them in the future.

Details, Recapitulation
If there are details I need to add that weren’t central to my presentation—a perspective on life in those times, an anecdote that isn’t central but that illuminates something relevant, and so on—I add them at this point. If we’re short on time, I keep it short. If the review and presentation have gone quickly, I can “digress” and add a lot. This time also allows me to briefly recapitulate or synopsize the material I have presented.

(Steiner: “I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

A Last Question
I complete my presentation in two important ways, ways that, although they may take only a few seconds of time, lay the foundation for my future teaching, give the students something to chew on overnight, and lay the ground for good discipline (which is to say, good behavior, which is to say, an attitude of wanting to learn, to hear what I have to say). I ask an open-ended, discussion question, such as, “You learned today about all the different characteristics of cave paintings. What do you make of these? In particular, why is it important—I’ll tell you that I believe it’s very significant—that these paintings have a black outline around them?” Students may leap to answer immediately, but they know I won’t say more until the next day. They can talk on the playground, ask mom and dad at dinner, or forget the question until I remind them the next day, but they’ve heard it and taken it in. The question previews the next day’s review.

Anticipation
I also make a statement about what we’ll learn the next day. It may be prosaic—“Tomorrow we’ll move on to the study of ancient Egypt”—but it’s better if I can make it slightly mysterious—“Tomorrow you’ll learn about people who gave coffins as great gifts.” Whether they remember or not, these questions work in the students overnight and they enter the classroom ready to learn (and ready not to misbehave). I believe these few seconds are the single greatest discipline technique I know. I also know that if I don’t write down my question and topic, I will likely forget them until the class is dismissed. Even if I can conduct the lesson without notes, I write down these items in order to remember them.

Work
Then we get to work on essays, drawings, or paintings. We may go to the library to do research. The longer I teach, the less necessary I believe homework to be, and I try, especially in middle school, to have students complete their work, or at least the bulk of it, in class. We clean up our work (“Mr. Sagarin, can I keep working during recess?” “Yes, you may”), stand quietly behind our chairs, and are dismissed for snack and recess.

Attention
So this is what I aim at. It rarely goes as planned and never perfectly. But more important than anything listed above is attention to the students. Do I need to shorten my presentation because the students are exhausted? Fine. Does something I read inspire them, and I keep reading for an extra twenty minutes, and continue the next day? An example: One year I read a portion of Voltaire’s Candide to a class, simply to give them the flavor of his writing and thinking. They were so taken by it that we read a chapter a day for the rest of the block. I had not intended to do anything like this, but see great value in attending to students’ actual interests. Does my review fall on deaf ears? I’ll cut it short and spend an evening thinking about how to present it in a way that these students can hear.

Also, and this is tough to write about clearly, I try to be specifically aware of each student—I’m not good at this, but I try to make sure each student speaks at least once in each class (and that some students don’t speak too much). I try to pay attention to those who need attention and leave alone those who seem to need to be left alone. Also, if something I’m teaching relates to the circumstances of one of the students, directly (parent dies in real life; parent of historical figure died young) or indirectly (this student is obsessed with fairness, and someone I’m teaching about was known for being extremely fair), I keep the student in mind. I don’t blurt out, “Oh, and Johnny, didn’t your father die young, too?” In fact, I’m likely to try to be more tactful in discussing the historical circumstances, rather than less, given what I know. These may not be the best examples, but I think the point—lessons meet real life, we hope tactfully, in a classroom—is clear.

“Typical” Main Lesson (That is, one that never actually occurs)
10 min.: Class business.
3 min.: Verse.
15 min.: Music, but not in high school (I still wonder how necessary this really is in a main lesson period).
20 min.: Review (highly variable; and I increasingly think of this as the period of “real” learning—new material is an introduction…); discussion; note-taking.
20-30 min.: New material, including questions and added description (longer in HS).
1 min.: Question.
1 min.: Preview.
30-40 min.: Work; giving and collecting assignments. If everyone’s doing well, I can get some work done, too. (Shorter, but still present, in HS.)
Dismissal.

The Dinosaurs lived in Stockbridge?

Some students enter high school believing—as movies have shown them—that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the distant past. How distant, they cannot say, because to know the dates for the evolution of humanity—perhaps 4 million years ago—and the last mass extinction of dinosaurs—about 65 million years ago—leads to the simple realization that there’s no overlap here. Further, some students picture this overlap in historical time, Stone Age human beings fending off dinosaur attacks.

If we picture all of human history—about 10,000 years—on my blackboard, which is 5 feet wide, then where did the dinosaurs live? My blackboard is oriented north-south, parallel to Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Putting today, 2011, on the far right and the Neolithic revolution, around 8000 BCE, on the far left, we can then extend the timeline back, north along Main Street, and ask, where did the dinosaurs last live? And the answer is, roughly, a bit more than 6 miles north, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of Norman Rockwell and the Red Lion Inn. It’s amusing to picture the dinosaurs in rocking chairs on the Red Lion’s porch, perhaps smoking the cigarettes that, according to Gary Larson, may have done them in. (As one of the largest remaining wood-structure hotels, I’m sure there’s no smoking allowed on the front porch of the Red Lion.)

Comparing the distance between the end of the age of dinosaurs and the beginning of history gives a valuable and needed corrective perspective for students who suffer from too many movie images of the world.

The Evolution of a Disregard for History

Do we assume that we are smarter than those who lived before us? Do we assume that if only they could have thought of the automobile or the ballpoint pen or derivatives they would have invented them?
It seems to me that elements of this argument contain truth—our knowledge of mathematics increases; things that were long unproved get proved. Our technology is greater than that of any earlier peoples, so far as we know. But perhaps this is all to say that we’re cleverer, not necessarily smarter. Or smarter in a way that’s important to us but simply may not have been to earlier people.

Certainly Archimedes had a genius for invention, but declined to share much of it with the world, disdaining application and deciding that it was unethical to perpetuate some of his creations. Was he a crackpot, or did his view represent the views of others in the ancient world?

We could as easily turn the argument around, at least in thought, and take the part of some ancients. In the last four or five hundred years, they might ask, have you written epics and plays as sturdy as the Odyssey or Oedipus? Do your buildings rival the pyramids, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe? Are you closer to Nirvana than we were?

The difference, it seems, is not a difference of intelligence, it’s something else—priority, focus, mentality, or consciousness.

When Allan Bloom asks, obnoxiously, where is the Zulu’s Plato, he’s narrowing the question too much, unbalancing the scale (and assuming that he in 20th century Chicago is somehow closer to Plato than a Zulu, simply because he participates in an academic tradition that honors Plato…).

The question, perhaps not one we have the historical knowledge or understanding to answer, is, what was as important to the ancient Zulus (or their ancestors) as philosophy was to Plato, and how did they manifest this? To assume that because we don’t know about it, it didn’t exist is just an error of logic.

And to assume that our priorities or mentality are superior to those of the ancients according to arbitrary rules that favor us before the competition is announced is just unfair. Worse, it leads to a disregard for the possibility of seeing the world in a different way, to a devaluing of history, and to a narrowing of each of us who thinks this way.

Ancient history, Language, and Meaning

One of the greatest challenges in teaching or studying ancient history is to develop, even to a small degree, an appreciation for the consciousness of those who lived in ancient times. They simply didn't mean the same things we mean when they used (in their ancient languages) words like the words we use now.

Take any modern abstract word, as my dear friend Owen Barfield pointed out, and you will find an earlier concrete meaning. "Spirit," for example, which means hardly anything anymore (that is, it means lots of different things to lots of different people and is, consequently, difficult to use with meaning), used to refer to "breath." So the ancients had a concrete, literal consciousness where we have an abstract one.

But that's too easy. Take any modern concrete word, and you will find an earlier symbolic or metaphorical meaning. "Heart," for example, refers to a muscular chest organ, and, more strongly in the past, to qualities associated with heart--sympathy or courage, for example. So the ancients had a symbolic consciousness where we have a literal one.

This reversal is also too easy. Because it's not as if they weren't fully aware--even more aware than we are, as herdsmen, warriors and butchers--of the concrete meaning of heart, as well. So, in ancient times, the symbolic and literal meanings of words were more closely related than they are now. "Heart" meant simultaneously the organ and its associated qualities.

Now, we attach somewhat less meaning to each of our many words but speak our meaning more clearly. We are rarely confused, we are rarely required to examine our sense of ambiguity, when we hear the word "heart."

The ancients attached more meanings to far fewer words--the world was simpler, working vocabularies smaller. This simultaneous simplicity of language and concentration of meaning allowed them to tell and to write stories that were accessible on many levels, for example, stories to which a child could listen but that a wise man could ponder.

The facts of the physical evolution of human beings become ever clearer. But it may be erroneous--and it is certainly a logical fallacy--to believe that this physical evolution must necessarily be accompanied by an evolution from a brute lack of intelligence--a la the cavemen in all the cartoons--toward whereever it is we are now.

If we take seriously a movement of language and meaning back through time from more words and less meaning to fewer words each with more meaning, we may imagine an arrow pointing to the prehistoric past. This arrow points in the general direction of a word containing all meaning, if you will. And "In the beginning was the word."

C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image

I picked up C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image because I read A.N. Wilson's excellent biography of Lewis this spring, and a mention there made me think I'd like to see it. I'm glad I did.

The "discarded image" to which the title refers is the worldview of human beings in the western hemisphere--Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, European (heavy on the Europeans--this is C.S. Lewis, an Englishman, and what we may call the Middle Ages happened largely in Europe)--between, say, Homer and the Renaissance. Lewis's argument is that in order to understand Medieval literature, it helps to understand the worldview from which it springs. No doubt. And, in going through the literature, brilliantly--is there anything Lewis hasn't read and digested?--and adroitly--his style as a writer is lucid, charming, and respectful--Lewis paints a picture of a world so different from ours it's hard to imagine.

But the task he has set himself is to imagine this world as he discovers it in literature, and he shows us how we may do the same. This, then, is as much an exercise in history and appreciation of historical difference as it is an introduction to literature. The literature becomes the lens through which we see the Medieval mind.

Lewis's tour of the heavens (imagine looking up into a bowl of beautiful, meaningful actors, not out into unfathomably empty space), the earth, and its inhabitants leaves me yearning not to return to those violent, muddy, ignorant times, but to achieve with the benefits of modern consciousness the same relationship to a meaningful world.

For those who find Rudolf Steiner a crank, idiosyncratically spouting nonsense about the spiritual world, The Discarded Image shows, by inference, that Steiner's attempt was not to inject ignorant fantasy into the hard realities of the modern world, but to recover the meaning of spirit, soul, and cosmos as they were understood in earlier times. Read Lewis's exposition of Vegetable Soul and Sentient Soul, based in several Medieval works, and see how these relate directly--they're talking about the same thing--to Steiner's concepts of etheric and astral lives. Find threads going back through the Middle Ages to Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus that illustrate what Huston Smith calls "the perennial philosophy."

Lewis is not espousing one view over another. He's not seeking a return to older ways of thinking and knowing. He acknowledges that the medieval view of the world is largely and fundamentally wrong, or that it contains many untruths.

But he is clear that medieval thinkers were sensitive to the limits of their knowledge, acknowledging the tentative, theoretical or hypothetical nature of their concepts. Toward the end of the book, he contrasts this openness and sensitivity to the insensitive way in which we approach the apparent "reality" that we perceive given not only our scientific knowledge but also our unacknowledged, unquestioned assumptions about the world we believe we live in. In a nod to his friend, Owen Barfield, Lewis notes that the change from the ancient to the modern world is not so much a change in the facts of the world as it is a change in our understanding of what is meant by a theory.

Lewis is clear that much of what Medieval people believed was factually wrong--we needn't quibble about that--but their appreciation for logic, fact, and theory was more highly developed than ours is.

Accusations of Racism and Waldorf Education

Introduction: Questions of Racism

Waldorf schools have had to contend, especially in the 1990s, with accusations of racism that take two distinct forms. The first is that their principal founder, Rudolf Steiner, expressed racist notions and, therefore, despite whatever other good they may do, schools must disavow these ideas. The second is that schools have, through their curriculum or other institutional practices, expressed racist ideas. In this case, schools should presumably acknowledge their errors and expunge the offending practices or attitudes. This paper is a history of these accusations and of the question of racism in Waldorf education in the United States. It will touch on the accusations of racism against Rudolf Steiner, but a full treatment of this question is beyond the present scope. Further, this paper grew out of research into the history of Waldorf schools that had quite another orientation--the historical promise and equally historical compromises Waldorf schools and teachers have made in finding their way through the 20th century in the United States. Consequently, this is a rough, anecdotal and preliminary investigation of the question it addresses. It contains a small number of stories and observations that I tripped across in the course of other research, and I trust readers to interpret these appropriately. In no way should readers believe I have necessarily seen this situation whole nor addressed its history definitively.

Racisms

The discussions I will examine in constructing this history have generally taken for granted that “racism” has a more or less single objective reality. That is, they have assumed that readers will understand what is meant by racism without examining the concept further, without examining its various complexities and manifestations. I will not attempt to define racism here, but I wish to divide it functionally in four ways before questioning Waldorf education about it. These distinctions are: a. between descriptive and pejorative racism; b. between intentional and naive racism; c. between systemically active and systematically passive racism; and d. between racism generally present in American cultural contexts and racism specific to Waldorf methods, interpretations or representations.

a. The first important distinction exists between what I will call “descriptive” racism and “pejorative” racism. (I have borrowed the terms in quotation marks from Raymond Geuss (1981), whose discussion of the concept of ideology extends easily to a discussion of racism as ideology.) Descriptive racists recognize some historical or biological validity to distinctions of race but do not presume to make claims regarding the superiority or inferiority of any race based on these distinctions. Descriptive racism was certainly the norm until recently, and, technically, is not at all what most people mean when they call someone a racist. Within this strictly technical definition, Steiner was a descriptive racist during the period in which he was a Theosophist, but later moved away from this position.

Some contemporary thinkers see skin color and other indicators of race as existing within a broad plane or spectrum; the distinctions we have labeled “race” in the past are seen to be somewhat arbitrary cultural or political abstractions from a continuum or spectrum of skin colors and physical characteristics. (See Appiah 1992 and Gates 1992) Whether or not this view is supported by genetic or other evidence, time may tell.

Pejorative racists, as the term denotes, recognize distinctions of race--they are, then, a subset of descriptive racists--but claim superiority for one or more races. In common use, “racism” is implicitly pejorative, and anyone today wishing to use concepts of race descriptively will do so in other terms or at her own peril.

b. Racism can further be divided between intentional and naive racism. This distinction is, unfortunately, not as clear as we might wish. Steiner probably intended to be heard as objective, not as a racist, when he spoke, for example, about “blue-eyed, blond haired intelligence,” (March 3, 1923; publication undated) although he plainly did intend to express the concepts contained in his thought, viz., that, in his opinion or experience, the rise or occurance of a particular kind of intelligence was generally associated historically with particular physical characteristics. Without the history of German National Socialism, it’s difficult to know if such a statement would be freighted with such racist overtones today. Regardless, I believe there is a useful conceptual difference between intentional and naive racism, even if the semantics of a given situation can be cloudy.

Further, I am specifically avoiding in this distinction the terms “conscious” and “unconscious,” although they may well apply in these circumstances; it is not my intention to load the discussion with psychological luggage. I am simply interested in knowing so far as possible whether or not someone makes racist claims deliberately.

c. Racism may also be divided between its systematic or institutional appearance and application and its individual appearance. The conventional distinction between institutional and individual racism, however, strikes me as too often convenient and irresponsible, like labored notions of a collective memory or a collective unconscious. There is some validity, however, in the idea that institutions and systems can promote a kind of racism that is different from unintended individual racism. To address this, I will refer to systematically active and systematically passive racism. Passive institutional racism is racism that arises in the wake of the status quo or the promotion of one culture to the unintended detriment of another. Active institutional racism aims to alter the status quo in order to promote the welfare of one race at the expense of another. Again, it is not easy to draw distinctions here, and history may judge an institution differently under different circumstances. Real estate markets, for example, often straddle the line between active and passive racism. Some brokerages intentionally act to further white suburban interests, while others merely passively allow such interests to take precedence.

d. Finally, especially with regard to the history of Waldorf education, we must distinguish the fluid “background” racism of American culture both generally and as it is expressed in Waldorf teachers and schools from “surplus” racism that may result specifically from Waldorf methods or interpretations.

These functions of racism create an oppressive blanket--institutional and individual, deliberate and unwitting, active and passive. Lifting one corner of this blanket will reveal racism at work, but the blanket itself must disappear to see the end of racism. To the extent that Waldorf schools in the United States have woven themselves into the blanket of racism, or found themselves in its threads, they “must take with utmost seriousness every suggestion that [they are] in any way, inadvertently or otherwise, in thrall to attitudes and practices that would hinder [their committment to serving all children],” in the words of Douglas Sloan (1996).

With these distinctions in mind, it is time to address history itself.

Steiner and Racism

Rudolf Steiner was attacked, literally, as an anti-racist by nationalists and anti-Semites during his life. Now, eighty years later, he and the Waldorf schools that espouse his pedagogy have been attacked as racist. How did the same thoughts and statements come to suffer attacks from radically opposed points of view?

1922-1941

In May 1922, the New York Times reported an attack on Steiner, a report that is brief enough to quote in full:

RIOT AT MUNICH LECTURE. Reactionaries Storm Platform When Steiner Discusses Theosophy.

BERLIN, May 16.--Munich enjoyed a riotous demonstration when Germany’s high
priest of Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner, delivered a lecture on ‘Vitalization of
Thought,’ before an audience more than half composed of women. Organized
reactionaries, Nationalists and anti-Semitics [sic] attended the lecture in
force, and toward the end the electric lights were switched off and pandemonium
broke loose. Lighted firecrackers and stink bombs were thrown at the long-haired
Theosophist, and then Steiner’s foes stormed the stage, and a free fight ensued
until police cleared the hall.

Then the demonstrators marched to Railroad Station Square with the intention of hauling down the Republican colors. But these are now taken in at dark and secreted in safe places. The chagrined demonstrators therefore contented themselves with singing the imperialistic “Flag Song” around the flagless flagpoles.

Steiner’s topic that day--“Ways to Know the Spirit in Ancient and Modern Times” (author’s translation; the lecture has been published in German but it has not been translated into English)--was as typical for him as any, and contained nothing that could have provoked the attack. His attackers were protesting Steiner’s public, recognized anti-racist, anti-nationalist positions. Such opposition was not isolated. One German-American with whom I spoke (who does not wish to be identified) attended a debate between Steiner and a German military officer some time in 1919 as a member of a group that intended to heckle and insult Steiner. This man was so impressed by Steiner’s speech and manner, however, that he did not join the protest. On the contrary, he later became interested in anthroposophy, unfortunately, he notes, after Steiner’s death. After moving to the United States in the 1920s, this man became a prominent biodynamic farmer, employing Steiner’s suggestions for the development of healthful agriculture. (Personal communication, March 21, 1998.)

This very early resistance to Steiner’s universalism contradicts the position taken by present Waldorf critic Dan Dugan (1998) who contends that Waldorf schools and anthroposophy were suppressed in Germany only because their racism was of a different stripe than the official Nazi line. In the absence of evidence, this accusation borders on the irrational. While some of Dugan’s criticisms of Waldorf schools are substantial and valid--regarding occasional bad science or history teaching, for example--these are too often lost in a specious and vitriolic haze of rhetoric. During World War II, Waldorf schools were closed by the Nazis, not, as Dugan has claimed, because they offered a racism that competed with the National Socialist view, but because their emphasis on human freedom threatened an authoritarian regime. (See "Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland, Geistige Indiviualitat und Gattungswesen," Sonderheft, Sommer 1995. Referred to in Sloan, D., 1996).

Further, Ida Oberman (1999) makes clear in her dissertation on the history of Waldorf education that schools in Germany employed different strategies and compromised in different ways to remain open as long as possible, but were, in the end, all closed by government order. Some Nazi functionaries--and Waldorf parents--initially saw possibilities for the instrumental use of Waldorf schools to foster Aryan myths, but were disabused of these fantasies by the considered policies and curricula at the schools.

My focus is on Waldorf education in the United States, however, and I leave this topic to others.

Dugan’s interest in Steiner is political, not scholarly. A balanced view of Steiner’s position would not seek, as Dugan does, only to pluck potentially racist statements from an enormous body of work, almost all of which is beyond reproach. On the other hand, it also would not seek, as did several conversations I have had with teachers at Waldorf schools, to blur or paper over disturbing passages. This defensive attitude on the part of some Waldorf teachers and anthroposophists has been noted and rightly criticized by Dugan. The most balanced, scholarly and thorough treatments of Steiner’s position may be found in essays by Douglas Sloan (1996) and Detlef Hardorp (1999). Sloan deals with Steiner’s thought as a whole, however, and does not attempt to refute every claim of racism nor examine every potentially racist statement. Hardorp’s essay examines several potentially offensive passages in Steiner’s work.
Despite questionable passages, however, there can be no clearer statement regarding Steiner’s (1990b) considered views on race than this:

[T]he anthroposophical movement . . . must cast aside the division into races.
It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the
divisions and differences between various groups of people.

Steiner follows this with a disavowal of theosophical talk of “seven races” and “seven sub-races” as an “illness of childhood.” Researchers find theosophical talk of “root races” in Steiner’s work, but must recognize that, as he grew through theosophy to anthroposophy, he changed both his mind and his terms of expression.

Incidentally, the book from which the quotation above is taken, The Universal Human: The Development of the Individual, (1990b) summarizes in its title Steiner’s appeal to “ethical individualism.” Ethical individualism grows from the idea that it is in the exercise of our individuality that we become most universally human; that is, we act ethically when we consciously oppose the drives and desires that seem to us so personal but that do not distinguish us from others in any real way. This succinct idea is itself an anti-racist statement.

1944

Faculty meeting minutes from the Rudolf Steiner School in New York record a first application by a black student on October 11, 1944. The ensuing discussion is illustrative of the contest between imperfect teachers and an ideal they know they should hold. One states firmly that “there is no question of accepting the boy if he’s qualified,” while another wonders if the school isn’t being singled out as a “test case.” The faculty decides to pass the matter before the Board of Trustees before making a final decision, recognizing the potential economic consequences. Unfortunately, future minutes do not record whether or not the applicant was admitted.

Of equal importance to the question of the admission of the black applicant was a corollary discussion in which it was recorded that the school had an “unwritten rule” that no class would be constituted of more than one-fourth Jewish children. The minutes make clear that this rule was not referred to when a particular trustee, who was Jewish, was present. Further research may establish whether or not this policy was ever enforced, although its very existence argues that the question was raised at least once. Given the influx of Jewish refugees before and during World War II, and given the Steiner School’s particular and contested interpretation of itself as a “Christian” school, we can comprehend the perceived cultural threat while deploring the policy.

In all, the discussion in the minutes, despite a suspicious teacher or two, strikes a contemporary reader as relatively enlightened, coming as it did in the year of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944/1996), a discussion of “the Negro problem” in the United States and almost a decade before the Civil Rights movement really started to move. In the case of this discussion, it may be said, Steiner's ideas provide a scaffold useful for promoting an anti-racist act: the potential admission of a black student. And when a racist policy--a quota on Jews--is discussed, it is not justified with recourse to Steiner's ideas. In 1944, among one small American school faculty, it is clear that Steiner is still considered an anti-racist.

1970-1990

For years The Waldorf School of Garden City had an all white faculty and an all or mostly black custodial staff. One sees here passive racism at work; without intent, the broad economic system of suburban Long Island--white white-collar workers supported by minority blue-collar workers--had been replicated within the school, a school that, had it been asked, would have promoted itself as anti-racist.

Similarly, because most of the teachers at the school were Christian and because anthroposophy is too often spoken of thoughtlessly as “Christian,” festivals and assemblies had a Protestant Christian flavor, not noticed by Christians themselves, who may well have thought they were “toning things down” for public consumption, but very evident and occasionally upsetting to Jewish families with whom I spoke.

According to one credible account, a candidate for a high school teaching job at The Waldorf School of Garden City in 1979 was asked by a high-level administrator who was interviewing alone, "What is your surname?" When the candidate, who is Jewish and who now sends children to a Waldorf school, answered with a name typically taken to be Jewish, the administrator continued, "Please get on your knees." The candidate, naive, eager to please, and sincerely interested in the esoteric basis of Waldorf education, did so, not knowing what to expect. "To teach here, you must accept Jesus as your savior," the administrator allegedly said. The candidate ended the interview on the spot and ran down the hall. Jewish anthroposophists reassured the candidate later that such statements reflected a relatively unique point of view, and were not generally taken to be true or appropriate.

In the late 1980s some members of the faculty at The Waldorf School of Garden City voiced concerns regarding a growing population of African (and Caribbean) Americans in the school. The discussion was not overtly racist, but concerned whether or not the school might eventually become a predominantly black school; the problem foreseen was not a problem of black culture, if such a construct exists outside white imagination, but of the continued economic viability of the school. This point of view is a mirror image of the white fear that a black neighbor in the suburbs will drive down property values. That is, it was both an economic possibility--although how real may be open to question--and a moral failing. For whites, Adam Smith’s invisible hand is often white.

Similarly, while the school did not set out to teach a "white" education, several African-American students with whom I spoke felt the marked absence of “their” culture. None wished to speak for attribution. "It was so clear. White music with a few black spirituals. No black heroes except in February. No African-American folktales," said one graduate of the school from the 1980s, someone who values the school and dreams of starting a scholarship fund at the school for children of color.

In a North American survey (undated), completed in 1994, dividing results between favorable and unfavorable narrative responses, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) lists a ratio of 27:17, favorable to unfavorable, with regard to questions of “understanding/appreciation of other individuals/cultures.” Responses from the Garden City school show the greatest variation, but it should be noted that this school, with few exceptions, has had the largest minority population of most established Waldorf schools and of almost all with high schools for decades. At a gathering of 12th grades from various eastern Waldorf high schools in 1991, of the half-dozen students of color, only one--from Washington, D.C.--was not from The Waldorf School of Garden City.

1992-The Present

I can find no discussion of racism in published discussions of Waldorf education prior to 1992, when the question arose following a Dutch investigation of possible racism in the teachings of some Dutch Waldorf schools. (See McDermott 1996) The Dutch schools, followed quickly by others worldwide, quickly disavowed racism and, by default, any possible racist statements of Rudolf Steiner’s. As de Volkskrant notes (McDermott 1996), the furor in Holland was over a course in ethnography, added to the curriculum in Holland and, so far as I can determine, not taught in the United States, although even here some teachers have mentioned others who have transgressed some line of conscience in presenting racial stereotypes. Like cannibalism, however, always attributed to neighboring tribes, I spoke with no teacher who actually taught racial stereotypes or expressed less than a politically correct position on the matter.

The rottenness in Holland coincided more or less with the introduction of Waldorf educational methods into some U.S. public schools, beginning with the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, a “choice” school within Milwaukee public school system. (99% of the students and about half the teachers at this school are African American.) In light of the news from Holland and the recent introduction of Waldorf methods into some public schools, Ray McDermott of Stanford University followed an evaluative visit to the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School with an article in the Waldorf Education Research Institute’s Research Bulletin, in which he commended Waldorf schools for their “quick response” to the issue, typified by a letter from David Alsop, Chairman of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:

We have resolved to take an honest and penetrating look at ourselves and our schools to see if indeed racist attitudes and behavior exist, and to make every effort to change if this is the case. (8 October 1995)

Another Opinion

I asked Charlotte Colbert, principal of the Urban Waldorf School about eurocentrism or racism in the Waldorf curriculum. "I don't know where Steiner got them," she said, "but music, dance, movement, storytelling, these are African traditions." (Personal communication, February 21, 2001)

These notes in the history of Waldorf education might end here, but for the Waldorf critic Dan Dugan, parent of a former student at the San Francisco Waldorf School and that contradiction, a devout skeptic. Dugan posted translations of several Dutch articles relating to the stew there, included McDermott’s essay, and threw in a vituperative press release he had written himself regarding the tragic story of a disturbed son of two Waldorf teachers who killed a policeman and then shot himself. (1998) In his press release, “Denver Skinhead’s Family Professed Sophisticated Version of Aryan Superiority Myth,” Dugan writes,

Anthroposophists insist that they are not racists, and there is no reason to
doubt their sincerity. They just don’t understand that Steiner’s mythical
history was old-fashioned in his own time and is ridiculously ignorant in
ours.

Steiner was clear, however, that the material of anthroposophy, some of it esoteric “mythical history,” was not fit for nor intended to inform Waldorf schools or the education of children. To the extent that some school teachers attempt to translate complex esoterica for school children, they are clearly wrong-headed. For Dugan, who clearly sees Waldorf schools as part of cult conspiracy, to single out examples of ignorance among Waldorf teachers as evidence for the failure of a method of education, however, is equally wrong-headed.

Steiner’s View?

Steiner’s view on race evolved from his early theosophical writings to his later anthroposophical writings; nonetheless, Steiner may accurately be called a descriptive racist, with the strange caveat that, according to his evolutionary view, race itself is a vestige of an earlier time. (I have no room nor inclination here to summarize Steiner’s claims nor the process by which he arrives at these claims.)

Dan Dugan is also a founding member of PLANS (People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools), an organization that has brought lawsuits against California Charter Waldorf schools in the Sacramento and Twin Ridges districts. (Cases dismissed 2001) The basis for these suits was violation of the “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. According to Dugan, at least one of the schools has admitted that anthroposophy is a religion (shooting themselves in the foot, it seems. Plenty of people argue successfully that it is not.

Dugan’s arguments, and the discussion regarding separation of church and state, are remarkably semantic. Any belief other than a sincere belief in skepticism (true skeptics must be skeptical even of their own skepticism, a humble and uncommon position), it seems, may be challenged or promoted as a religion in this New Age. On the other side, Steiner made it clear any number of times that anthroposophy was not intended to be a set of beliefs, but a method for learning to know the world. Again, to the extent that Dugan singles out individual ignorance as evidence of a rotten system, his logic if faulty. And to the extent that some ignorant Waldorf teachers don’t understand the method they espouse, their platform is shaky. In the end, of course, we are all in the same boat with regard to these questions. No one can claim a perfect understanding of anthroposophy, and in its broadest form, some of the wisdom of humanity embraces even those who eschew its sectarian forms and its apparently untestable hypotheses.

Conclusion

Dan Dugan’s hold on the imagination of Waldorf schools and teachers is due largely to our legalistic culture and to the power of the Internet, which allows everyone to become his own publisher.

The present discussion, as a discussion of who is included and who excluded by a particular culture, can also inform discussions of religion--especially Christianity--anti-Semitism, Eurocentrism, and anthroposophical dogma in Waldorf schools. As a model for each of these discussions, I believe my tentative conclusions stand. That is, while some Waldorf teachers may be dogmatic, anti-Semitic or Eurocentric, for example, these failings are failings of their culture, their interpretations of Steiner’s work, and, most important, of their imaginations. Anthroposophy, the wisdom of humanity, surely allows no less. Further, the history of an idea often involves the sclerosis of certain concepts connected with it as they embed themselves further and further in the institutional culture that surrounds them. Waldorf schools are remarkable places, but places inextricably bound to the discourse on race in the United States, whether they acknowledge this or not.

References

Appiah, K. (1992). In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dillard, C. (1995). “Threads of Promise, Threads of Tension.” In Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education, Fall/Winter 1995, 37-40. Fair Oaks, CA.
Dugan, D. (1999). “Dan Dugan on his Sunbridge Experience.” E-mail to: waldorf-critics@lists.best.com
Dugan, D. (1999). http://www.dandugan.com/waldorf/index.html#Articles
Gates, H. (1992). “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes.” In Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.
Geuss, R. (1981). The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. New York: Cambridge University Press.
“Graduate Survey--1994.” (undated) G. Kemp, project coordinator. Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.
Hardorp, D. (1999). Rudolf Steiner on Issues of Race and Cultural Pluralism: Steiner and “Steiner Critics” in Perspective. Amherst, MA: The Pedagogical Section Council of North America, The Anthroposophical Society in America.
McDermott, R. (1992). “Waldorf Education in America: A Promise and Its Problems.” In ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation, 15, 2 (Fall), 82-90. Washington, DC: Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
McDermott, R. and I. Oberman (1996). “Racism and Waldorf Education.” In Research Bulletin, 1, 2 (June), 3-8. Spring Valley, NY: Waldorf Education Research Institute.
McDermott, R., et. al. (1996). Waldorf Education in an Inner City School: The Urban Waldorf School of Milwaukee. Spring Valley, NY: Parker Courtney Press.
Myrdal, G., et al. (1944/1996). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Vol. 1. New York: Transaction Publishing.
“Riot at Munich Lecture.” New York Times, May 17, 1922, p. 7.
Rudolf Steiner School Faculty Meeting Minutes [RSS Archive], October 11, 1944. New York, NY.
St. Charles, D. (1994). Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April 1994; date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated tape recording.
Sloan, D. (1996). “Reflections on the Evolution of Consciousness.” In Research Bulletin, 1, 2 (June), 9-15. Spring Valley, NY: Waldorf Education Research Institute.
Steiner, R. (undated). “Color and the Human Races.” In The Workmen Lectures, M. Cotterell, trans. Dornach, Switzerland, March 3, 1923. New York: Anthroposophical Society.
Steiner, R. (1929). The Mission of Folk-Souls (In Connection with Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology). A course of 11 lectures given in Christiania in June 1910. H. Collison, trans. New York: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (1990b). The Universal Human: The Evolution of Individuality. Four lectures given between 1909 and 1916 in Munich and Bern. Bamford, C. and S. Seiler, trans. [no city]: Anthroposophic Press. See especially pp. 12-13.
Steiner, R. (1966). “Wege der Geist-Erkenntnis in älterer und neuerer Zeit.” In Blätter für Anthroposophie, 18, 11 and 12, November and December 1966. Lecture given in Munich, May 15, 1922. Untranslated. Basel: Rudolf Steiner-Fonds für wissenschaftliche Forschung.

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.)

Representations of Waldorf Education VII: Fidelity and Flexibility

A fifth book, Ida Oberman’s fascinating and much-needed historical study of Waldorf education in Germany and the United States, Fidelity and Flexibility in Waldorf Education, 1919-1998, supports my division of the history of Waldorf schools into generations, representing three of them in its third section. Oberman’s book is divided into three sections. The first examines the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart from its founding until Rudolf Steiner’s death in 1925. The second examines the course of Waldorf education in Germany after Steiner’s death and during the rise and reign of the Nazis. The third traces the transplantation of Waldorf education to the United States.

The first section locates the origin of the first Waldorf school in Steiner’s intellectual biography. From his interests in Goethe and theosophy, through the founding of the Anthroposophical Society to the threefold social movement, Oberman details the bases for a curriculum based in German cultural history, school administration independent of the state (“free” schooling), and the idea of schooling as social transformation. By anchoring the founding of the first school in the realities of Steiner’s life and the social and political life of Germany after World War I, Oberman provides perspective on what otherwise can seem like a Waldorf decalogue, handed down once and for all time without apparent compromise or context. To add to the context or “cultural field” described by Oberman, as Nancy Parsons Whittaker has suggested, the curriculum of the first school, for example, was also constrained by state requirements and by the strengths and weaknesses of those whom Steiner recommended to teach.

In the second section, Oberman locates a structure for understanding the history of the spread of Waldorf schools in the actions and reactions of anthroposophists and Waldorf teachers upon Steiner’s death. Some, like Marie Steiner, strove to preserve in purity their understanding of Steiner’s wishes. Others, like Hermann von Baravalle, sought to accommodate their understanding of Waldorf education and anthroposophy to their understanding of their audience. And still others, like Ita Wegman, tried to further an understanding of Steiner’s indications through a process of evolution.

Oberman then examines the activity of German Waldorf schools during the rise to power of the Nazis. Her findings, carefully and sensitively presented, should really be no surprise. Too often we forget the ease with which we read history backwards, knowing the results, forgetting that this is a luxury denied to those who lived through it. That some parents and Waldorf teachers saw parallels between Nazi ideology and the German culture as presented in the Waldorf curriculum should not surprise us. Neither should the fact that some teachers argued for making compromises with the state in order to keep schools open as long as possible. Nor should the subtle resistance of Waldorf teachers who discovered a radio “broken” just at the time students were required to listen to a broadcast by Hitler. Nor should Oberman’s description of Hitler’s picture (display required by law) side by side with Steiner’s on a school wall. These details and many others provide a vivid picture of teachers, parents and students living through turmoil central to the twentieth century.

Turning her attention to the United States, Oberman finds the strategies or modes of operation that arose following Steiner’s death—purity, accommodation, and evolution—in U.S. Waldorf schools. She describes the first school, the Rudolf Steiner School of New York City, as one that pursued a “quest for purity” by hiring a number of native German speakers familiar with Waldorf education and by hewing close to the curriculum of the original school in Stuttgart. Further, with the closing of Waldorf schools in Germany, Oberman describes the New York school as assuming the mantle of leadership among Waldorf schools. Whether or not other schools internationally accepted this decision—or even knew of it—is another matter. Oberman’s description of the New York school as one seeking purity is generally accurate, I believe. Curative or therapeutic eurythmy was called “Heil” eurythmy throughout the 1930s, and the school reported annually not only to “Headquarters” (the New York City Anthroposophical branch office) but also to Stuttgart. On the other hand, for example, Baravalle, Oberman’s accommodationist, lectured to the faculty and community frequently, and was offered the position of Director of the school in the late 1930s. He refused, for reasons of his own. Faculty meeting minutes also reveal that a debate occurred as to whether or not it was appropriate for teachers in American Waldorf schools to have German (or other) accents. Such examples are numerous. Purity, to the extent it was sought by the New York school, was not sought uncontested.

Oberman describes the constellation of people around the founding of the Kimberton, PA, school, von Baravalle and Alarik Myrin chief among them, as a group that sought to minimize the anthroposophical ground from which Waldorf education grew. Here again, Oberman is largely correct, I believe. I have greater familiarity with the Garden City, NY, school, Myrin’s second school, and the history of this school also speaks to an attempt to accommodate what the founders saw as a more pragmatic American attitude, one that had little interest in promoting anthroposophy to parents or a larger community. (Rather, especially through the Myrin Institute for Adult Education, they sought to promote fruitful ideas that were often but not always grounded in anthroposophy without discussing anthroposophy itself publicly.) Von Baravalle and Elizabeth Grunelius, both teachers in the first school in Stuttgart, were present in the very early years of the Garden City school but soon left the school to the Americans.

Taken together, and given the long term success—relatively equal among the schools Oberman studied—what are we to make of these differences? Is there room for each, or is one strategy better or more successful by some criteria? I would say that there has been a gradual blending over the years, and that it would be extremely difficult for an outside observer today to distinguish these separate paths to the present from present conditions. Purity is necessarily tainted by seventy years past. Accommodationists have relaxed their stance, on the one hand, and, on the other, everyone else has pursued certain necessary accommodations. Schools have made significant efforts to include their—unfortunately generally small--African American or Jewish populations, for example. We are all, perhaps, evolutionists now. (The argument might be made that, in Oberman’s terms, purity and accommodation are two poles between which evolutionists live.)

Despite my admiration for and agreement with most of what Oberman writes, I must take exception to two particulars. The first is her use of the unqualified “Waldorf” to mean Waldorf education, ideology, and reform. It is a convenient shorthand, as in the phrases, “how Waldorf followers use the past in their present,” or “the history of Waldorf in America.” On the other hand, it reifies and objectifies a form of education that only gradually came to be so calcified after seventy or more years of history. It is an ahistorical weakness, then, that the carreful reader must guard against, especially, for example, when it is inserted unwarranted into a quotation from Emil Molt and Fritz von Bothmer: “The faculty now active at this school have proven... their willingness to continue this [Waldorf] work...” That they did not call it “Waldorf” work is a historical fact, indicative of a less exclusive point of view that deserves greater recognition.

Second, Oberman represents Waldorf education, primarily through its schools, as an “ideology” and a “German reform.” Further, Oberman refers to Steiner’s “target group,” for example, and to Waldorf education’s “theater of expansion.” No doubt historical actors have treated Waldorf education as an ideology operating to reform in a theater of expansion. One should also include, however, consideration for the ways in which Waldorf education strives not to be ideological and does not necessarily represent a German reform, or a “reform” of any but the most expansive, inclusive kind. Reform implies an activist agenda, and plenty of Waldorf teachers have been and are activists. An understanding of freedom or of Waldorf education, however, does not particularly support—or deny support for--any but the most personally transformative activism. And from another point of view Waldorf schools have resisted expansion, cloistering themselves, spending most of a century perfecting an exclusive jargon. This is part of their history, too.

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.