If Gardner’s voice aims at the prophetic and Emersonian, M. C. Richard’s voice in Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America aims at the oracular. “In new age consciousness, the religious impulse continues to evolve. Like the sun, it shines across all divisions.” (156) As with many, many pronouncements in this book, we may agree or disagree, but we are given little to support a discussion. This is not to say that Richards does not present a progression from idea to idea, but that the ideas are too often ill-examined or axiomatic. What exactly are “new age consciousness” and “the religious impulse”?
Another example demonstrates the limits of her approach. Richards teases apart Steiner’s concept of “Geisteswissenschaft,” translated literally as “spiritual science.” This word normally describes what in English speaking countries are the studies called the humanities or human sciences, but Steiner intends to revive, in part, its older meaning as a knowledge of the human being conceived as microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmic universe (see, for example, Hildegard of Bingen, quoted in Fox 1987) and as a being of body, soul and spirit. “Spiritual science,” Richards writes, is science that is “not a tool… not intellectual science.” “Spirit uses intellect but goes beyond it. Spiritual science requires the union of inner perception (spiritual) and objectivity (science).” (43) The spiritual may involve “inner perception,” although Richards would agree there’s much more to it than this, but objectivity, while scientific, is also spiritual. In fact, Steiner’ spiritual science aims to overcome the apparent dichotomy between objective and subjective experience not in blending or coupling them (nor in using one to destroy the other), but in transcending them—or, equally, discovering the immanence of one in the presence of the other—to discover a common source for each. Semantically, of course, the term “subjective” implies both its opposite, “objective,” and a pair of negations, “non-subjective” and “non-objective.” But this semiotic-rectangular view of these concepts is reductive and analytical. A synthetic view, which, like a geometric proof, can be obtained only through an intuitive, participatory leap, and not through an explanation, discovers the situational or contextual unity of experience. “Subjective” and “objective” do not cancel each other out in meaninglessness; they are poles between which experience is strung.
In searching for an analogy or example to describe this unity of experience, Richards employs “the [physicist’s] recognition that the observer is part of the observed.” This contradicts our naïve understanding of cause and effect, but does not reach what might better be called the unity of quantity and quality. The indeterminance—and apparent unity—of the principles of physics does not lead to understanding or love, which are conscious experiences of quality.
Richards’ book reads like a collection of essays. But for a few introductory chapters and a conclusion, the contents leap around, from “Education As an Art” to “Teacher Training and Handwork” (in itself an odd and inexplicable combination, understandable only in view of Richards’ work as a potter). In its deliberate embrace of the “new age” and its view of Steiner’s work as “alternative”, it represents well the generation of schools I call the Alternatives.
Showing posts with label m. c. richards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label m. c. richards. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Representations of Waldorf Education II: The Creation of Waldorf Education
I have called the object of my study here “Waldorf education”, but history shows that even that term, well accepted today, came into being only gradually. A. C. Harwood’s title and index do not contain the word “Waldorf,” he does not use the phrase “Waldorf education” at all, and he refers only infrequently to “Waldorf schools”, and then only as representing or modeling the “educational work” or “philosophy” of Rudolf Steiner. I enclose the term philosophy in scare quotes because of my conviction that Steiner’s work does not constitute primarily a philosophy, but a methodology. Steiner deals with epistemological and ontological questions, for example, (see especially Philosophy of Freedom 1970) but his primary concern is the attainment of knowledge, not that knowledge itself, and a description of being, not a theory of it.
John Gardner does not examine this point explicitly, but he does refer primarily to Steiner’s “educational method.” He refers to Waldorf schools and Waldorf education only in the central essay of the book, “The Experience of Knowledge,” the single essay in which he is at pains to view Waldorf schools as models for the implementations of Steiner’s method. The connotation here, different from the present as we shall see, is that Steiner’s method is not synonymous with the existence of education or schools that call themselves “Waldorf.” In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” (1996), Gardner himself employs the word “Waldorf” in quotation marks. “I believe strongly in the excellence and soundness of the new insights that stand behind the ‘Waldorf’ impulse in education; but I am less than enthusiastic about accepting the name generally used to designate this impulse, for it gives no clue as to what the new beginning actually intends or involves,” he continues (12-13). Gardner would likely have agreed that any teacher and any school could, with good will, employ the model we have come to know as Waldorf education. (Cf. Emmet, B. (undated) From Farm to School: The Founding of the High Mowing School).
M. C. Richards objectifies Waldorf education far more than these first two authors do. She refers to “Rudolf Steiner Education,” “Waldorf Education,” and “Waldorf schooling” interchangeably. Her tacit assumption, one that she represents in her generation, is that Waldorf education, the curriculum, principles and practices of Waldorf schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, have a kind of concrete reality that is missing from considerations of earlier authors. The subtle irony here is that her commitment to “become undivisive in our science, our emotions, our creativity—to live in the paradox of separateness and connection…” (156) is initially undermined by her acceptance of the objective existence of something called Waldorf education.
By 1999, Eugene Schwartz’ index contains the following entries: Waldorf approach, Waldorf education, Waldorf high school, Waldorf kindergarten, Waldorf kindergarten playground, Waldorf main lesson, Waldorf method, Waldorf nursery teachers, Waldorf Room [sic], Waldorf school pupils, Waldorf schools, and Waldorf teachers. The process of objectification, clearly, does not end with the creation of one object, but threatens to continue indefinitely. Continued ad absurdam, the process would produce a “separate but equal” parallel “Waldorf” universe. Schwartz, of course, is not responsible for this onslaught of terminology; his vocabulary is simply the one available to him, and the points he examines concern other aspects of education (see below).
The objectification of Waldorf education is not an inherently reprehensible process. It eases discussion of important issues in education and creates a core around which communities of teachers, students, parents and others may form. Although I raise the issue here, I have also relied on the term throughout this work. On the other hand, carried too far, objectification threatens to dichotomize an idea that, at least initially, opposed such a split. Discussion of Waldorf education, once created as an object, then poses itself “against” other forms of education, forms that must themselves be objectified even to be allowed into the discussion. Further, communities gathered around such an unquestioned, objectified idea may become insular. This process traces the rise of a fundamentalism to which Waldorf communities are certainly not immune. In a small way, the separation of “Waldorf” ideas about teaching and learning from more conventional or accepted ideas mirrors, for example, the separation of Protestantism from Catholicism in the 16th century.
I have traced this process of objectification briefly with reference to a few books, but these are simply symptomatic of a wider process. The creation of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), also exemplifies this process. The Association began with informal conferences of about a dozen Waldorf schools in the mid-1960s and continued through a formal incorporation around 1980. (I have been unable to ascertain the exact year of the founding of AWSNA.) Since then, the Association has trademarked the name “Waldorf” as it applies to education in the United States, categorized schools by affiliation status, decided that public schools cannot be Waldorf schools, and, most recently, become an accrediting body for Waldorf schools. This gradual institutionalization, necessary or helpful as it may have been to those involved, also charts the development of an exclusive educational precipitate, “Waldorf schools.”
As Waldorf education became more established in the United States, its promise as a model for education generally was compromised, in part, by its objectification. By coming to reside, or to be seen to reside, in specific schools only, it forsook its status as a way to discuss how teachers teach and children learn, and became much more than that; an exclusive culture and institution. This process may be traced through the books that I will now examine in more detail.
Before I proceed to the books themselves, however, I should point out three things. First, although the Steiner School in New York City opened in 1928, I am unaware of any book-length considered descriptive works in English on Waldorf education—separate from translations of Steiner’s works—before Edmund’s of 1947 and Harwood’s of 1958. This may reflect two characteristics of early practice: A thorough engagement with Steiner’s work itself, especially including the translation of German material into English, and an active struggle in the few small schools and classrooms to survive from day to day and year to year, a struggle that left little time or energy for book-length reflections.
Second, especially because each of the books I will examine is born of experience, not, for example, of theorizing, agenda-setting, or policy-making, each book represents a culmination of life in a school or of thinking about education. For example, John Gardner’s book was published in 1975, the year he retired after twenty-five years as Faculty Chair of the Waldorf School of Garden City. It is not a state-of-the-art examination, but a reflection of roughly the years 1950-1975. This point may seem obvious, but it points to the value of the books I will examine as historical artifacts. Each is a “summing up” of years prior to publication.
Third, although each successive author almost definitely knew of those preceding him or her, the later of these works contain few references to the others’ books (M. C. Richards refers readers to Harwood’s book once, and Eugene Schwartz acknowledges a couple of contributions from John Gardner, but they seem to refer to personal conversations and not to published work). This is odd given the very few works that aim at any sort of general description of Waldorf education, but may be understandable given the changing needs for a general work. Rather than sources or influences (or opportunities for rebuttal), previous works may simply be so much ink under the printing press, so to speak.
John Gardner does not examine this point explicitly, but he does refer primarily to Steiner’s “educational method.” He refers to Waldorf schools and Waldorf education only in the central essay of the book, “The Experience of Knowledge,” the single essay in which he is at pains to view Waldorf schools as models for the implementations of Steiner’s method. The connotation here, different from the present as we shall see, is that Steiner’s method is not synonymous with the existence of education or schools that call themselves “Waldorf.” In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” (1996), Gardner himself employs the word “Waldorf” in quotation marks. “I believe strongly in the excellence and soundness of the new insights that stand behind the ‘Waldorf’ impulse in education; but I am less than enthusiastic about accepting the name generally used to designate this impulse, for it gives no clue as to what the new beginning actually intends or involves,” he continues (12-13). Gardner would likely have agreed that any teacher and any school could, with good will, employ the model we have come to know as Waldorf education. (Cf. Emmet, B. (undated) From Farm to School: The Founding of the High Mowing School).
M. C. Richards objectifies Waldorf education far more than these first two authors do. She refers to “Rudolf Steiner Education,” “Waldorf Education,” and “Waldorf schooling” interchangeably. Her tacit assumption, one that she represents in her generation, is that Waldorf education, the curriculum, principles and practices of Waldorf schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, have a kind of concrete reality that is missing from considerations of earlier authors. The subtle irony here is that her commitment to “become undivisive in our science, our emotions, our creativity—to live in the paradox of separateness and connection…” (156) is initially undermined by her acceptance of the objective existence of something called Waldorf education.
By 1999, Eugene Schwartz’ index contains the following entries: Waldorf approach, Waldorf education, Waldorf high school, Waldorf kindergarten, Waldorf kindergarten playground, Waldorf main lesson, Waldorf method, Waldorf nursery teachers, Waldorf Room [sic], Waldorf school pupils, Waldorf schools, and Waldorf teachers. The process of objectification, clearly, does not end with the creation of one object, but threatens to continue indefinitely. Continued ad absurdam, the process would produce a “separate but equal” parallel “Waldorf” universe. Schwartz, of course, is not responsible for this onslaught of terminology; his vocabulary is simply the one available to him, and the points he examines concern other aspects of education (see below).
The objectification of Waldorf education is not an inherently reprehensible process. It eases discussion of important issues in education and creates a core around which communities of teachers, students, parents and others may form. Although I raise the issue here, I have also relied on the term throughout this work. On the other hand, carried too far, objectification threatens to dichotomize an idea that, at least initially, opposed such a split. Discussion of Waldorf education, once created as an object, then poses itself “against” other forms of education, forms that must themselves be objectified even to be allowed into the discussion. Further, communities gathered around such an unquestioned, objectified idea may become insular. This process traces the rise of a fundamentalism to which Waldorf communities are certainly not immune. In a small way, the separation of “Waldorf” ideas about teaching and learning from more conventional or accepted ideas mirrors, for example, the separation of Protestantism from Catholicism in the 16th century.
I have traced this process of objectification briefly with reference to a few books, but these are simply symptomatic of a wider process. The creation of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), also exemplifies this process. The Association began with informal conferences of about a dozen Waldorf schools in the mid-1960s and continued through a formal incorporation around 1980. (I have been unable to ascertain the exact year of the founding of AWSNA.) Since then, the Association has trademarked the name “Waldorf” as it applies to education in the United States, categorized schools by affiliation status, decided that public schools cannot be Waldorf schools, and, most recently, become an accrediting body for Waldorf schools. This gradual institutionalization, necessary or helpful as it may have been to those involved, also charts the development of an exclusive educational precipitate, “Waldorf schools.”
As Waldorf education became more established in the United States, its promise as a model for education generally was compromised, in part, by its objectification. By coming to reside, or to be seen to reside, in specific schools only, it forsook its status as a way to discuss how teachers teach and children learn, and became much more than that; an exclusive culture and institution. This process may be traced through the books that I will now examine in more detail.
Before I proceed to the books themselves, however, I should point out three things. First, although the Steiner School in New York City opened in 1928, I am unaware of any book-length considered descriptive works in English on Waldorf education—separate from translations of Steiner’s works—before Edmund’s of 1947 and Harwood’s of 1958. This may reflect two characteristics of early practice: A thorough engagement with Steiner’s work itself, especially including the translation of German material into English, and an active struggle in the few small schools and classrooms to survive from day to day and year to year, a struggle that left little time or energy for book-length reflections.
Second, especially because each of the books I will examine is born of experience, not, for example, of theorizing, agenda-setting, or policy-making, each book represents a culmination of life in a school or of thinking about education. For example, John Gardner’s book was published in 1975, the year he retired after twenty-five years as Faculty Chair of the Waldorf School of Garden City. It is not a state-of-the-art examination, but a reflection of roughly the years 1950-1975. This point may seem obvious, but it points to the value of the books I will examine as historical artifacts. Each is a “summing up” of years prior to publication.
Third, although each successive author almost definitely knew of those preceding him or her, the later of these works contain few references to the others’ books (M. C. Richards refers readers to Harwood’s book once, and Eugene Schwartz acknowledges a couple of contributions from John Gardner, but they seem to refer to personal conversations and not to published work). This is odd given the very few works that aim at any sort of general description of Waldorf education, but may be understandable given the changing needs for a general work. Rather than sources or influences (or opportunities for rebuttal), previous works may simply be so much ink under the printing press, so to speak.
Representations of Waldorf Education I: Four Books, Four Generations
NOTE: This post is more than 8000 words, so I have posted it in 8 sections.
In chronological order, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner (Harwood 1958), The Experience of Knowledge: Essays on American Education (Gardner 1975), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Richards 1980), and Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century (Schwartz 1999), represent four distinct phases or generations of Waldorf education in the United States. I have chosen to call these generations: 1.) Europeans; 2.) Americans; 3.) Alternatives; and 4.) Variations. (Regarding the inadequacy of the name of the latest generation, any history that attempts to approach the present will necessarily stumble as it nears its goal. I leave it to the future to rename appropriately the contemporary generation when—or if—its character becomes clear. Also, it seems to me, attempts to categorize many things leave a last category, “other”, that serves to demonstrate the ultimate inadequacy of categorizations such as I have undertaken here. This does not contradict the value or utility of taking a stab at it nonetheless.)
These generations mirror closely, although this occurred to me years after first conceiving of them, the generalized generations of historians described as “conflict,” “consensus,” and “plural.” Very simply, many historians, led perhaps by Charles Beard (1913/1986), largely before the Second World War, saw historical change growing out of class conflicts as well as political theory. Even the small presence of Waldorf schools in the United States before World War II shows evidence of this conflict view in the struggle to translate a European, especially German, working-class education for, especially, a New York Upper East Side clientele. Consensus historians, largely after World War II, emphasized common purpose in the movement of history, describing the Continental Congress as, in John P. Roche’s phrase, a “reform caucus,” for example (in Higham 1962). Similarly, having found a more or less secure footing in the U.S., those who thought about Waldorf education after the War described it, for example, as offering a balance to the pendulum swings between traditional and progressive modes of education. (see Gardner 1975). The “new” pluralistic history abjures large-scale syntheses and throws the field open to a multi-faceted approach that includes history “from the bottom up” and consideration of previously marginalized groups (see, among others, Lemsich 1968). And during this period, from the mid-1960s on, Waldorf schools began increasingly to portray themselves not as fellow-travelers in search of educational answers, but as (self-) marginalized institutions themselves. Recently, since 1990 or so, hard to characterize briefly, Waldorf teachers and schools find themselves examining issues from the role of Waldorf education in public school systems and juvenile corrections to the separation of church (and school) and state. (See, for example, Smith, undated, and Oppenheimer 1999.)
The ease with which Waldorf generations may be shoehorned into a simple historiography suggests two things: First, that changes in historical interpretation must themselves be historicized to consider how the practice of history reflects broader contemporaneous social concerns; and, second, that the fit between my object of study and this view of historical interpretation probably calls the simplicity of that historiography into question more than it validates my descriptions.
The books I examine here do not constitute a canon in the literature of Waldorf education; rather, they are among the few works that attempt to portray Waldorf education generally for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with it. Three more works that might be included here but are not, for example, are Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf Impulse (Edmunds 1947), Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Easton 1975), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Sloan 1983). Edmunds’ work, although it appeared originally a decade before Harwood’s, is largely superceded by Harwood’s more thorough investigation. The works of Easton and Sloan largely regard topics other than Waldorf education, although each book contains a chapter or an extensive appendix on Waldorf education.
Further, a large and growing body of literature examines or extends aspects of Waldorf practices, curricula and methodologies, but works in this mode usually assume some familiarity with Waldorf education itself, familiarity that can be gained through Steiner’s work, experience in Waldorf schools, or the more primary texts examined here. Although these works as well might be examined to tease out the historical context in which they were written, to do so would likely not add much to the discussion I will begin here.
Although the generations I will describe are gross generalizations, they represent both a chronological progression and changing views of the promises and compromises, the possibilities, tensions and unsettled questions, entailed by the effort to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for a United States clientele.
Teachers wrote all the books examined here, although not all were teachers in Waldorf schools, (M. C. Richards taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for example) and they attempt to examine or characterize education broadly. They may describe classroom experience and practice, but their goal is to address educational questions beyond simple descriptions of Steiner’s ideas in practice. As these questions change—from a seemingly simple first comprehensive English introduction to Steiner’s ideas, through an Emersonian examination of fundamental questions of the meanings of education in the assumed context of the Cold War and a re-casting of Waldorf education as an educational form that mirrors the growing New Age, to an indictment of misapplications of child psychology in education, for example—a history emerges that shows Waldorf education changing in changing contexts. Waldorf education appears, then, not as a monolithic tablet on which the answers to an educational debate are inscribed, but as a responsive partner in a dialogue. Admittedly, this partner has been virtually silent in the United States for the past seventy years or so, but no less thoughtful or observant for that. Further, even the term “Waldorf education” has its own history.
In chronological order, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner (Harwood 1958), The Experience of Knowledge: Essays on American Education (Gardner 1975), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Richards 1980), and Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century (Schwartz 1999), represent four distinct phases or generations of Waldorf education in the United States. I have chosen to call these generations: 1.) Europeans; 2.) Americans; 3.) Alternatives; and 4.) Variations. (Regarding the inadequacy of the name of the latest generation, any history that attempts to approach the present will necessarily stumble as it nears its goal. I leave it to the future to rename appropriately the contemporary generation when—or if—its character becomes clear. Also, it seems to me, attempts to categorize many things leave a last category, “other”, that serves to demonstrate the ultimate inadequacy of categorizations such as I have undertaken here. This does not contradict the value or utility of taking a stab at it nonetheless.)
These generations mirror closely, although this occurred to me years after first conceiving of them, the generalized generations of historians described as “conflict,” “consensus,” and “plural.” Very simply, many historians, led perhaps by Charles Beard (1913/1986), largely before the Second World War, saw historical change growing out of class conflicts as well as political theory. Even the small presence of Waldorf schools in the United States before World War II shows evidence of this conflict view in the struggle to translate a European, especially German, working-class education for, especially, a New York Upper East Side clientele. Consensus historians, largely after World War II, emphasized common purpose in the movement of history, describing the Continental Congress as, in John P. Roche’s phrase, a “reform caucus,” for example (in Higham 1962). Similarly, having found a more or less secure footing in the U.S., those who thought about Waldorf education after the War described it, for example, as offering a balance to the pendulum swings between traditional and progressive modes of education. (see Gardner 1975). The “new” pluralistic history abjures large-scale syntheses and throws the field open to a multi-faceted approach that includes history “from the bottom up” and consideration of previously marginalized groups (see, among others, Lemsich 1968). And during this period, from the mid-1960s on, Waldorf schools began increasingly to portray themselves not as fellow-travelers in search of educational answers, but as (self-) marginalized institutions themselves. Recently, since 1990 or so, hard to characterize briefly, Waldorf teachers and schools find themselves examining issues from the role of Waldorf education in public school systems and juvenile corrections to the separation of church (and school) and state. (See, for example, Smith, undated, and Oppenheimer 1999.)
The ease with which Waldorf generations may be shoehorned into a simple historiography suggests two things: First, that changes in historical interpretation must themselves be historicized to consider how the practice of history reflects broader contemporaneous social concerns; and, second, that the fit between my object of study and this view of historical interpretation probably calls the simplicity of that historiography into question more than it validates my descriptions.
The books I examine here do not constitute a canon in the literature of Waldorf education; rather, they are among the few works that attempt to portray Waldorf education generally for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with it. Three more works that might be included here but are not, for example, are Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf Impulse (Edmunds 1947), Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Easton 1975), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Sloan 1983). Edmunds’ work, although it appeared originally a decade before Harwood’s, is largely superceded by Harwood’s more thorough investigation. The works of Easton and Sloan largely regard topics other than Waldorf education, although each book contains a chapter or an extensive appendix on Waldorf education.
Further, a large and growing body of literature examines or extends aspects of Waldorf practices, curricula and methodologies, but works in this mode usually assume some familiarity with Waldorf education itself, familiarity that can be gained through Steiner’s work, experience in Waldorf schools, or the more primary texts examined here. Although these works as well might be examined to tease out the historical context in which they were written, to do so would likely not add much to the discussion I will begin here.
Although the generations I will describe are gross generalizations, they represent both a chronological progression and changing views of the promises and compromises, the possibilities, tensions and unsettled questions, entailed by the effort to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for a United States clientele.
Teachers wrote all the books examined here, although not all were teachers in Waldorf schools, (M. C. Richards taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for example) and they attempt to examine or characterize education broadly. They may describe classroom experience and practice, but their goal is to address educational questions beyond simple descriptions of Steiner’s ideas in practice. As these questions change—from a seemingly simple first comprehensive English introduction to Steiner’s ideas, through an Emersonian examination of fundamental questions of the meanings of education in the assumed context of the Cold War and a re-casting of Waldorf education as an educational form that mirrors the growing New Age, to an indictment of misapplications of child psychology in education, for example—a history emerges that shows Waldorf education changing in changing contexts. Waldorf education appears, then, not as a monolithic tablet on which the answers to an educational debate are inscribed, but as a responsive partner in a dialogue. Admittedly, this partner has been virtually silent in the United States for the past seventy years or so, but no less thoughtful or observant for that. Further, even the term “Waldorf education” has its own history.
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