Is Waldorf Education a Religion? Is it Religious? Is it Based on a Religion Called Anthroposophy?

The issue of religion and Waldorf education is not a simple one. The field extends, minimally, over three points of view. The first might be that all education, all meaningful human endeavor, has, in the broadest sense, a religious component. As A.N. Whitehead (1929/1967) said, “The essence of education is that it be religious.” (14) To speak of value, explicitly or implicitly, is to give evidence of a religious engagement with the world. This view is too broad to consider here, however, and does not necessarily distinguish Waldorf education from other methods.

The second point of view, probably the source of Waldorf critics’ frustration with aspects of Waldorf education as manifested by certain teachers or, potentially, by certain schools, is that Waldorf education is religious in a more conventional sense because some ideologues, through misunderstanding and misapplication of Steiner’s work, make it so. As Dorothy St. Charles, former principal of the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School said in a radio interview, Waldorf education is not a religion, “but some people make it one.”

The third point of view, and the more carefully considered, is that Waldorf education and anthroposophy, the method that underlies it, are not religions at all. Douglas Sloan, former coordinator of the joint program in Religion and Education between Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, made this point eloquently as an expert witness in a lawsuit arguing that charter Waldorf schools, as religious schools, violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sloan (2004) argued against this view:

By all scholarly criteria of what constitutes religion, anthroposophy is not a religion. ...

The attempt to define religion has been notoriously difficult, and the approaches to doing so are many. In general there have been three main approaches.

The first can perhaps be called the essentialist approach. Essentialist definitions tend to focus on the inner essence or substance, the metaphysical reality claims, of religions, and the relationships to these demanded of human beings by the claimed realities. One of the conceptual difficulties with this focus is that philosophers and others can make metaphysical and ethical arguments about the nature of reality without advancing these as themselves constituting a religion, although they may well have implications for religion.

The second main approach to the study and definition of religion can be called the functional approach, and is probably the theoretical approach most favored by social scientists, although as I shall point out, some theologians also favor it. Functional definitions of religion stress the effects, the functions of religion, in actual life—the ways in which religion functions to fulfill basic human needs, both individually and communally. Different scholars stress different functions as the defining characteristic of religion. Among these various functional definitions are, for examples: the cognitive—religion provides meaning systems for understanding and coping with life; the psychological—religion functions to meet psychological needs, such as, a sense of security in the face of life’s uncertainties, a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and so forth; the social—religion serves primarily to provide values for social cohesion and the preservation of the social group; and the ideological (Marxist definitions of religion are a good example)—religion serves the power interests of governing elites by deluding the masses. Each of these taken by itself is decidedly reductionist, and, in order to avoid inordinate reductionism, most scholars attempt to fashion combinations of various functional approaches.

One form of functionalism, often utilized by students of religion, is that of the twentieth-century American theologian, Paul Tillich. Religion Tillich defined as expressing “the ultimate concern” of an individual or of an entire culture. Every person and every society, he argued, has its “ultimate concern” (often, to be sure, directed toward less than ultimate objective realities).

In fact, for Tillich, every culture is grounded in its own ultimate concern, to which it gives concrete expression. Culture itself as a whole is, therefore, the religious expression and activity par excellence.

“Religion,” Tillich famously wrote, “is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion.” Tillich’s position can be a good illustration of how the strength of the functionalist can also be its main weakness. The strength is that it enables one to see the religious functions, as noted above, of many human activities not usually recognized as religious: the state, the university, science, technology, the stock exchange, Sunday afternoon football, and so on. Each has its ultimate concern, and often its own “priesthood,” paths of initiation, dogmas, sacred texts, and other marks of religion.

The weakness is that a definition which begins to apply to everything often ends up telling us little about anything.

In view of these various approaches, it is not surprising that one leading historian of American religion (Catherine Albanese of UC Santa Barbara), whose works I reviewed in forming my opinion, has observed that scholars have become increasingly less certain about what should be counted as religion as a general phenomenon. “In the end,” she writes, “religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life, and therefore it is difficult if not impossible to define it.”

In this light it is probably also not surprising that historians of religion turn mainly to the third approach to the definition of religion, namely, the formal. Scholars in the history of religion and comparative religion deal primarily with the actual religious forms manifested by concrete religious groups and movements. These religious forms include such things as beliefs and doctrines (creeds), ritual activities, forms of worship, sacred texts, and recognized sources of authority. The advantage and strength of this approach is that it is concrete and makes it possible to determine whether a group actually functions, not just religiously in general, a la Paul Tillich, for instance, but as a formal, identifiable religion as such. It also is possible then to distinguish it in detail from other religions and their forms, and to trace the actual development of a specific religion over time. In this perspective, a religious group is one that manifests and is organized around these common religious forms, albeit with its own distinct versions of them. This approach can also incorporate aspects of the first two approaches.

It is especially from the perspective of this third approach to the definition of religion, the formal, that I can meaningfully and concretely testify that anthroposophy is not a religion. …

Anthroposophy is the name given by Rudolf Steiner to designate the way of knowing, the method of inquiry, that he established. …

It is a wholly personal choice not only whether one follows Steiner’s method of knowing and tries to develop it, but also whether, out of conviction, one accepts–or does not–Steiner’s own results and content flowing from that method as he practiced it. If the principle of individual freedom based on knowledge is violated in following Steiner’s indications, then the entire method is vitiated.

It is worth noting that the case was dismissed and dismissed again upon appeal. I believe PLANS plans another appeal. Stay tuned.

St. Charles, D. (1994) Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April; exact date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated cassette tape recording.

Sloan, D. (2004) “Declaration of Douglas Sloan in Support of Defendants’ Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment…” Case No. CIV. S-98-0266 FCD PAN. PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School District, Twin Ridges Elementary School District, DOES 1-100. United States District Court, Eastern District of California. July 30, 2004.

Whitehead, A. (1929/1967) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.

How to Ruin the Soul of the Child

Translations of Quotations Taken Out of Context from Rudolf Steiner

(Before we begin, you deserve some attempt to make sense of Steiner’s frequent references to “soul ruining,” some of which are collected below. As a first pass at attempting to say, in part, what Steiner may have meant by “soul ruining,” we may turn to a recent item on NPR’s Planet Money. Job training, it turns out, is more effective for those who have had an early childhood education, controlled for socio-economic variables. Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman found that training relies on what he calls “soft skills,” which “involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated,” things you learn in preschool. Astonishingly, on average, boys who went to preschool, in one study, were found to be 50% less likely to be in jail, and to earn 50% more than their peers. Further, skills not learned early are harder and harder--and ultimately impossible--to learn later. Doesn’t it seem possible—adjusting for translation from an early 20th century German idiom, expressed in lectures transcribed later—that the souls of one group were less “ruined,” in an early 21st century, non-judgmental way, than the souls of the others?)

Conclusions can live and be healthy only in the living human spirit. That is, the conclusion is healthy only when it exists in completely conscious life. That is very important, as we will see later. For that reason, you ruin children’s souls if you have the children memorize finished conclusions.
p. 150
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Proceed to reflect with the children, without hesitation, that you are looking beyond their horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the children that they will understand only later. The principle that dictates that you teach the children only what they can understand and form an opinion about has ruined much in our culture.
pp. 48-49

You can present the human intellect, in a makeshift way, with historical or physiological facts before age twelve, but by doing so you ruin human nature; strictly speaking, you make it unsuitable for the whole of life.
p. 110

Do not give children verbal definitions but show them the connections between the concepts and the phenomena related to air and those related to solid bodies. Once we have grasped the concept of solid bodies flowing in the direction in which they tend when not prevented, we can dispense with the concept of air flowing into empty space. Healthier concepts would arise than those that fill the world today—such as Professor Einstein’s complicated theory of relativity. I mention this as a passing comment on the present state of our civilization, for I cannot avoid pointing out how many harmful ideas live in our culture (such as the theory of relativity, especially in its most recent variation). These ideas run a ruinous course if the child becomes a research scientist.
p. 117

By using shorthand, we retain something in our culture that, if left to ourselves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially awake in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night studying ruins the health of overzealous students. For this reason, our culture is no longer truly healthy.
p. 132

The children do not as yet have a full understanding for matters of the rights sphere, and if they are confronted with these concepts too early in their development, their soul forces will be ruined for the rest of their lives because such concepts will be so abstract.
p. 151
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/discussions_with_teachers/discussions_with_teachers.pdf

Experimental psychology can be a valuable basis of psychology but when it sneaks into pedagogy and even into courtrooms, it ruins everything that requires healthy development, that needs fully developed people not separated by a gulf from other fully developed people.
p. 150

We must not understand our task as imagining that what is good for one is good for everyone, since thinking so abstractly would be the ruin of all genuine desire.
p. 162
For the convenience of the faculty, the child has, for instance, mathematics or arithmetic in the first period; then, perhaps Latin, then, maybe a period of religion. After that, there is music or singing, but maybe not even that, and, instead, geography. We cannot more fundamentally ruin human nature than by teaching children in this manner.
p. 168
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/education_as_a_force_for_social_change/education_as_a_force_for_social_change.pdf

The first thing you have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms that we can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown-up people about plants and animals, but you will ruin the individuality of the child if you use them at school.
p. 37
The chief point is that thinking must never, never be separated from visual experience, from what the children can see, for otherwise intellectualism and abstractions are brought to the children in early life and thereby ruin their whole being. The children will become dried up and this will affect not only the soul life but the physical body also, causing desiccation and sclerosis.
p. 84

Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child’s feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/kingdom_of_childhood/kingdom_of_childhood.pdf

Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.
p. 116
Through ill treatment, a violin may be ruined for ever. But in the case of the living human organism, it is possible to plant principles that are harmful to growth, which increase and develop until they eventually ruin a person’s entire life.
p. 137

We ruin our students’ future worldviews when we introduce them prematurely to subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, physics, dynamics, and so on.
p. 192

People prefer to fall back on traditional religious creeds, trying to bridge what remains unbridgeable unless they can rise from the sensory world to the spiritual world, as anthroposophy endeavors to do. For adults, such a conflict is indeed tragic. If it arises in childhood before the eleventh year, it brings disturbances in its wake that are serious enough to ruin the soul life of a child. A child should never have to say, “I study zoology and find nothing about God. It’s true that I hear of God when I study religion, but this does not help explain zoology.” To allow children to be caught in such a dilemma would be awful, since this kind of questioning can completely throw them off their proper course in life.
p. 281
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/soul_economy/soul_economy.pdf

At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.
p. 135
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/renewal_of_education/renewal_of_education.pdf

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.

Steiner's so-called "Education for Adolescents"

Among my pet peeves regarding the translation and publication of Rudolf Steiner’s educational work is this:

The book Education for Adolescents is misnamed and therefore overlooked by many Waldorf teachers who might benefit from studying it.

Through about the 1960s, the book was published with the uninformative but more accurate title, The Supplementary Course. It was called this because it supplemented the course that Steiner gave for the teachers at the first Waldorf School in late summer 1919 before the school opened its doors. After one year of success and failure, ups and downs, and observation of how the students and teachers were doing in real life, Steiner gave 8 lectures, literally a course for teachers meant to supplement the course he had given the year before.

Reading through, it’s clear, too that the first four of the eight lectures basically pertain to all teachers, not simply those who teach adolescents. And, later, when he addresses the teaching of adolescents—the Waldorf school was about to open its high school grades—it’s clear that he’s speaking to teachers of all grades (except early childhood, not because he didn’t want to, but because the first Waldorf school had no early childhood or kindergarten program at that point in its life).

It’s one thing for the book to be overlooked by those who might profitably read it.

It’s another when some do read it but ignore the discussion in it because “it's for high school students,” projecting an understanding of an erroneous title onto the contents.

Finally, it’s here, in lecture 3, that Steiner lays out, clearly and beautifully, the concept of a lesson carried over two days (not three; I am not aware of any source for a three day lesson), one that is not, in fact a “threefold” lesson in the conventional way these are conceived, but in a way that calls on the whole child to begin, that then carries into imagination and will, and that then returns to judgment and conceptualization on the following day.

But don’t take my word for it, read the darn thing yourself.

Threefold Social Organization and Waldorf School Governance

According to Rudolf Steiner, social organizations should have three cooperative but independent administrations—one to administer economic functions, one to administer rights and responsibilities of members of the organization, and one to administer what he calls the spiritual or cultural functions—he uses these words interchangeably in discussions of social questions—of the organization. These three administrations scale to cover the smallest institutions and the largest social groups. One administration may consider itself more central than the others to the mission of a particular organization, but all must balance if the organization is to maintain itself in health. A school, for instance, could mirror a theocracy if educational concerns are used to trump or bully the genuine concerns of the rights of its consumers.

This example points to the intuitive correctness of Steiner’s view. Take the opposite view; do we believe that justice should be bought and sold, or that the state should govern religion? For those seeking a more conventional (but no less difficult to comprehend) statement of a view of the theefold structure of society, Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a “lifeworld,” discussed in detail in the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, outlines a view that is essentially the same as Steiner’s. For Habermas, every communicative act—asking a question, making a statement—expresses all three of the human subsystems of thinking, feeling, and will. (That is, the most rigorous thought is still communicated with some emotional investment and some intention of will; the most emotional outburst still gives evidence of a thought and an intention, and so on.) Further, every communicative act, in that it is directed from one person to another or to a group of others, extends the human capacities of thinking, feeling, and will into a social interaction. Thinking extended into social interaction we may call culture; feeling extended becomes politics; and will extended concerns economic relations.

For Steiner, an economic administration should function according to a principle of solidarity (Steiner says “brotherhood,” but we should update this) through an “association of producers, distributors, and consumers.” For a school, a child’s education is a product in the economic sphere. It is more than this, but it is also this. Hence, a school should have an administrative body that is comprised of producers—representatives of teachers and staff—and consumers—representatives of the parent body as proxies for their children. Such an administration, to ensure that its work is legal and effective, will also require legal and financial expertise. (Introducing expertise of any kind, we should acknowledge, introduces something from the spiritual-cultural sphere.)

The work of this administration is to balance the needs, desires, and resources of producers and consumers to produce a budget and to plan for the future. Clearly, this administrative body may be identified with a school’s board of trustees.

An administration of the spiritual-cultural area of a school functions according to a principle of freedom, and so—despite tradition and received wisdom—it is difficult if not impossible to say how this administration will or should be governed. It might operate as a so-called College of Teachers that uses a consensus decision-making model, but, in freedom, there is no requirement that it do so.

Steiner did not specify a decision-making process for cultural organizations (and, if he did, we would still have to decide for ourselves whether or not we agree with his statements), and, in fact, in the meetings to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society in 1923-1924, stated that the process mattered little and should be left up to individual groups. One group might choose to function aristocratically, another more democratically. His position was that the structure mattered less than the persons involved, and that those chosen to carry out a task be given the freedom to do it. I believe his views here on constituting the administration of branches of the Society are directly applicable to constituting the administration of a Waldorf school. And, in the first Waldorf School, Steiner was the Director, appointed by acclamation (not by vote).

A spiritual-cultural administration consists of the teachers in the school, regardless of how they structure their governance or decision-making. As Steiner said, “no one who is not a teacher is to have anything to say [about how education is conducted].” Powerful words, if true. Of course, visiting teachers—consultants, mentors—and doctors and therapists who work with the students in a school may be included. But that’s about it. In a Waldorf school we may call this group the College of Teachers, the Core Faculty, the Council, or something else. We may worry that it is too small and too exclusive (and then work to make it larger and more inclusive—there are many ways to do this), but this is the body in most Waldorf schools that corresponds to the free administration of the spiritual-cultural life of a school.

And the work of this administration is the education of students.

A third administration, an administration of rights and responsibilities, which functions democratically according to a principle of equality, should clearly include representatives of every constituency of the school community, anyone who has any rights within the organization, anyone who has any responsibilities to the organization. Here we include students, parents, teachers, staff, alumni, retired faculty and staff, and even donors. All have some number of rights and responsibilities to the organism of the school. These include legally recognized rights, and so this administration requires legal representation, if not at every meeting, at least as a resource on-call.

(I use “rights and responsibilities” because I believe that to be a more revealing phrase in this context than “politics,” a word that is tainted in contemporary colloquial use, and more revealing than “legal,” which doesn’t go far enough to describe what I’m talking about. And I include “responsibilities” because these are clearly conceptually necessary, with rights, to describe what I’m talking about. Steiner includes them, although this is often overlooked or forgotten. To call it a “rights” administration alone indulges a kind of knee-jerk American selfishness—I’ll insist on my rights—and ignores the obligations that we owe each other in social interactions.)

Rights are myriad. Perhaps they begin with clear legally recognized rights, but they also include the policies and procedures of the school. Among other things, for instance, applicants have a right to a clear response to their application in a reasonable time. Responsibilities, too, are myriad. Parents must pay their bills. Teachers must engage in appropriate professional development. Breach of rights or responsibilities is reason for discipline or termination.

Policies, procedures, working conditions, contracts, all belong to this administration. Its work is to set and negotiate the boundaries within which the human beings in the organization conduct their work.

Often, it seems, this work is fragmented in Waldorf schools, is not given to one administration. The Board sets its own policies and procedures, as does the College of Teachers or Council. The support staff (administrative staff) may do the same. A Human Resources committee may assume responsibility for some aspects of this work.

This fragmentation may lead to confusion and miscommunication among parents, teachers, and board members. Dysfunction in this area seems to plague Waldorf schools, and I would say that this is, in part, because schools are clear about the function of a Board and a College but remarkably unclear about the function of this third administration—in fact, there is usually no single name we can use to designate it in a Waldorf school, and there is no single administrative body that consists of representatives of all the constituencies of the school.

(In many schools, the Board may see this administration as part of its legal function, but may then micromanage, fail to distinguish properly between economic concerns and those of rights and responsibilities, or fail to constitute and empower a committee that can take full responsibility for this work. Similarly, Colleges of Teachers may fail to distinguish their appropriate educational function from that of a separate rights and responsibilities administration.)

Schools would undoubtedly be stronger if there was a single administrative team, constituted according to correct principles, that oversaw this work. As it is, too often, policies are weak or incomplete, forgotten or ignored, or simply absent, sending persons of otherwise good will up a wall and out of a school.

As a test case, we might ask first about a clear process for terminating a teacher who is not fulfilling her responsibilities to her students or the school. Schools accomplish this, but often with far greater ill will and rancor than sister institutions (that don’t claim to have such an idealistic view of the world but that function with better management and clarity). And as a second test case, we might ask about a clear process and procedure for terminating this person if she is the Faculty Chair or other person who might otherwise be central to the termination of another colleague. Is there a safety valve or a back door?

Democracy here does not imply voting, or not voting alone. Dewey’s broad definition of democracy as “conjoint community” may point us in the right direction. Decision-making may be democratic and consensus-driven (within legal boundaries), or it may be representational and use some other decision-making process. The point is that all voices are heard and considered.

(I am indebted to my students at Sunbridge Institute for helping me clarify several aspects of this article; it attempts to summarize a week of work in an intensive course on school governance.)

What is Waldorf Education?

The following essay appears in slightly different forms and with slightly different titles as the introduction to a brief collection of Rudolf Steiner's lectures, What is Waldorf Education? as part of a chapter of my dissertation, Promise and Compromise: A History of Waldorf Schools in the United States, 1928-1998, and as an article in the Research Bulletin for Waldorf Education.

To the degree that this essay appears complete or polished, it masks the process by which I arrived at its conclusions. I set out to define Waldorf education simply by evaluating what Rudolf Steiner and others had claimed it was. At that point, I didn't realize that a ready, decent definition didn't exist. But the more I looked, the less I found.

I was simultaneously reading Owen Barfield and others, working toward an understanding of what Barfield calls "objectifying consciousness." And, one day, it struck me: to speak of "Waldorf education" is to indulge objectifying consciousness.

This realization led me to the following essay; it sent me on a search for what Steiner didn't say (see "Playing 'Steiner Says'"); and it led me to attempt to distill or characterize what it is that we mean when we talk about something called Waldorf education (see "What Makes Waldorf, Waldorf?"). These three essays constitute a whole; the other two appear here already, and this, the first, completes the group.

Introduction

Waldorf education does not exist. It is not a “thing,” and it cannot necessarily be distinguished from good education anywhere. Because it does not exist, it cannot be found in the boxes we call Waldorf schools. To narrow its definition to identify it with schools named Waldorf or Steiner schools, or to identify it with a particular curriculum or technique is to reify Waldorf education in a way that may describe part of what is but necessarily ignores what may also be. What we call Waldorf education may perhaps be found in any school, or anywhere that teachers teach and students learn. There is no characteristic or quality that is unique to what we call Waldorf education that cannot potentially be found somewhere else. Waldorf education, as an idea or set of ideas, slips through the cracks of any structure erected to define it.

Just as Waldorf education has no definite boundaries, it also has no definite origin. We may describe Waldorf education, for example, as arising from the educational conceptions of Rudolf Steiner. But many (most? all?) of these conceptions--for example, the idea that, culturally, at least, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (the development of an individual mirrors in microcosm the development of the species)--may be shown to be older than Steiner and therefore not to originate with him. (Beyond inferences from Steiner’s work, the idea that “the” Waldorf curriculum must include Norse myths in fourth grade or Greek history in fifth grade--curricular practices common in Waldorf schools--is difficult to discover. It’s not in well-known lecture cycles that he gave on education, nor is it in The Study of Man and its correlates, nor may it be found in Stockmeyer’s or Heydebrand’s well-known descriptions of German Waldorf school curricula.) In particular, for the United States, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson contain in prototypical form many of Steiner’s ideas about education.

Emerson and the Waldorf Curriculum

Emerson’s essay “History”, for example, presents an encapsulated curriculum that mirrors closely the general curriculum of many Waldorf schools. His language, too, mirrors Steiner’s in addressing the intellectual and emotional maturation of one person as, in part, a recapitulation of the intellectual and cultural developments to be found in human history.

The following quotations from “History” demonstrate the correspondence that Emerson finds between history and individual growth and development. This evolution of ideas is presumably based on knowledge of ancient cultures or at least exposure to them. Someone who had never heard of the Greeks, nor been exposed to their cultural influence even in a dilute or adulterated form, could not be expected in ontogeny to recapitulate this aspect of a cultural phylogeny. On the other hand, as Emerson implies at the end of the first two quotations, the state of being Greek, in the sense of “the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body,” may be universally human even for those who do not name it by the same name as Emerson:

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. (123)

In many Waldorf school fifth grades, when teachers claim students have achieved a grace and harmony of body and spirit that will soon be disrupted by the travails of puberty and adolescence, the class holds a Greek “Olympiad,” competing for laurels in javelin, discus and running races, striving as much for form and beauty as for victory. As well, Greek myths make up a significant portion of the literature of the fifth grade in many Waldorf schools.

The comparison between Emerson’s writings and Steiner’s is a study in itself. One more example will suffice here. For both Steiner and Emerson, the study of nature can guide and give meaning to personal experience. Neither means by nature what we might call “environmental studies,” although these would not be excluded; each means that symbolic meaning may be found in the reflective examination of the world around us.

It is essential that the secrets of Nature, the laws of life be taught to the boy or girl, not in dry intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before the soul of the child in such a manner that behind the parable he divines and feels, rather than grasps intellectually, the underlying law on all existence. “All that is passing is but a parable,” must be the maxim guiding all our education in this [elementary school] period. (Steiner, 1965, 33)

Here is Emerson on the same topic:

I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. …Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. (127)

Steiner’s thinking is often prefigured in Emerson’s, but this is not to say that they are the same. Toward the end of his essay “Education”, Emerson (1966) tosses in a towel that Steiner held onto like a bulldog: “I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching.” (225) Steiner, in concert with Emil Molt and a host of others, set out to reform our ways of teaching in a myriad of concrete ways. But, while broad and systematic, few or none of these ways were as original as we might believe, nor were they meant to be particular to some schools and not others.

A Unique Method?

Separate from the ideas in or behind Steiner’s conception of education, we might describe Waldorf education as a particular method. When we define method, however--and certainly in the case of Waldorf education we are not talking about a collection of techniques or a bag of tricks, but a method in a larger sense--we omit important elements of Steiner’s thinking. As Michael Lipson, recent translator of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, put it, somewhat cryptically, Steiner’s method is a “methodless method” that must be continually re-invented by each teacher for each student in order to be valid (Private communication, November 20, 1999). And if we use a more mundane definition of method, and speak of a particular curriculum or set of teaching techniques, Waldorf education still eludes capture. Schools that are not Waldorf schools and teachers who are not Waldorf teachers use, perhaps increasingly, techniques and conceptions of education identical to those propounded by Steiner, even though many of these teachers may never have heard Steiner’s name. “Looping,” in which one teacher stays with a particular class for several years, and block scheduling, in which one subject is studied intensively for a relatively brief time, are two such techniques. While no other school of which I know even approximates the curriculum found in a typical Waldorf school, there is nothing to prevent such adoption.

The Doctor Didn’t Say

One step toward recognizing that there is no such thing as Waldorf education is to realize that Rudolf Steiner himself rarely spoke or wrote about Waldorf education. The annotated bibliography of his collected works lists only a handful of references to “Waldorfschulpaedagogik,” “Waldorf School pedagogy.” He did speak and write at great length about education; how children grow and develop and learn, and how teachers may teach them. Further, in his work, Steiner claimed no particular originality. He did not see a discontinuity between what came before him and his own work. In his seminal pamphlet, The Education of the Child (1965), for example, Steiner quotes Jean Paul approvingly and at length. The sense one gets reading Steiner’s work, and this applies as well to his writings and lectures on matters other than education, is that ideas, like apples, lead an objective existence, and may be plucked by anyone. We might say that the “method” of Waldorf education is to learn to pluck these apples for oneself, as student or teacher, and not to rely on the authority of Rudolf Steiner to hand one already-picked apples. The analogy holds in that we may no more reify Waldorf education than we may divorce apples from the tree, sun, soil of their birth. Ideas, like apples, exist in and arise out of a context.

Staking a Claim

While I dispute the existence of “Waldorf” education, I do not dispute the existence of a group of schools that have chosen to identify themselves with the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart by calling themselves Waldorf schools, or to identify themselves with statements about education made by Rudolf Steiner by calling themselves Steiner schools. These schools have had a life of their own for more than seventy years in the United States, and have made a powerful claim on the ideas lumped under the term “Waldorf education.”

I cannot define or describe Waldorf education well, but I can investigate how others have defined or described it. I will begin outside the United States to include some of what Steiner himself said about what we now call Waldorf education. I will then focus on the strategies that writers and teachers in the United States have used to write about Waldorf education. (To see how Steiner’s conceptions of education made their way from Germany and Switzerland to the United States, see Ida Oberman’s study, 1999. Not available, unfortunately, is a similar account of the influence of British Waldorf schools and teachers on the United States. This is a study waiting to be written.)

Compromise

Moreover, I should like to point out to you that the real aim and object of our education is not to found as many schools as possible… but our education concerns itself with methods of teaching, and it is essentially a new way and art of education, so every teacher can bring it into their work in whatever kind of school they happen to be… and I have declared that the methods can be introduced into every situation where someone has the good will to do it. (Steiner, R. The Roots of Education, p. 30)

Some will acknowledge the validity of this passage but insist on a distinction between those who employ a “compromised” version of Steiner’s method (“Waldorf-inspired” schools or teachers) and “real” Waldorf schools that have deliberately dedicated themselves to this method. I maintain, however, that all manifestations of Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas are necessarily compromised. Schools that see themselves as pure because they are independent of the potentially corrupting influence of government money may be compared with schools, like the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, a choice school within the Milwaukee public school system, that have made overt compromises to meet present requirements regarding the separation of church and state. (One of these compromises has been to eliminate the word “God” from a verse that children in the school say each morning.) The Milwaukee school’s compromise is a deliberate choice made in order to facilitate other educational objectives, especially the education of relatively poor urban children. Independent (non-public) Waldorf schools, on the other hand, have clearly chosen, if not so deliberately, not to serve poor and near-poor students like those who attend the Milwaukee school. This choice is also a compromise.

Three of a Kind: Strategies and Descriptions

A First Strategy: Waldorf Schools ARE Waldorf Education

Existing descriptions of Waldorf education can be characterized according to three strategies. The first and simplest is to let Waldorf schools stand for a description; what goes on in Waldorf schools is inferred to be, by definition, Waldorf education. Ida Oberman’s otherwise excellent history, Fidelity and Flexibility in Waldorf Education, 1919-1998, slips into this mode, examining the histories of Waldorf schools in Germany and the United States, implying that these add up to a larger history of Waldorf education. To further her discussion she uses the concept of a “cultural field,” a metaphorical container for Waldorf education. Just as the field is a metaphor, so too is Waldorf education.

Stephen Talbott also uses this first strategy in an appendix to the also otherwise excellent book The Future Does Not Compute. He asks, “What is Waldorf Education?” and answers with a description of the founding of the first school and a description of a generalized curriculum. (424)

If Waldorf education were a consistent and prescribed method and curriculum, these analogies might suffice--although their definition is circular. But what goes on in Waldorf schools varies from place to place and time to time. There is no single characteristic, in fact, without which a Waldorf school cannot exist, nor that defines a school as a Waldorf school. Mentally erase beeswax crayons, or a eurythmist, or even the morning verse. A school without these items could still fulfill Steiner’s wishes for the education of children, I believe. Waldorf education simply cannot be seen as the accumulation or collection of some (even infinite) number of defining characteristics. To indulge such a fragmented view is to give credence to a reductionism that Waldorf education stands against.

A Second Strategy: Pigeonholes

The second strategy is to pigeonhole Waldorf education according to some cultural or historical characteristic that, while real enough within a particular context, may not be necessary or sufficient to describe something larger called Waldorf education. Waldorf education is defined only partially if it is defined as a reform movement, for example. To the extent that authors acknowledge the contingency of such synecdochical definitions (definitions in which the part stands for the whole), they may be serviceable, if incomplete.

Henry Barnes and the Movement

Henry Barnes, author and long-time history teacher and faculty chairman at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, characterizes Waldorf education as a particular movement: “As one of the most rapidly growing yet least known independent, nonsectarian school movements in the free world today, Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf education should be brought to the attention of all serious students of education.” (323) This may be true, but Waldorf education is only “independent” [of public education in the United States] and only a “movement” in the here and now.

Barnes writes, “This article will briefly outline the history of the Waldorf movement and seek to give an introduction to the philosophy and methods that underlie it.” (323) Philosophy and methods sound promising; they may extend beyond consideration of Waldorf education as a movement. For Barnes, the philosophy is based on two major principles or insights. The primary or defining principle of Waldorf education is an image of the human being:

Behind the Waldorf curriculum, its methods of instruction, and all the many practical aspects one thinks of when one thinks of a Waldorf school today stands the idea of man and of child development from which they all spring. It is this idea that gives them meaning and, in the end, is the basis on which the [Waldorf education] movement will have to be evaluated and judged. (326)

To speak of the education of a child necessarily implies a concept of what or who this child is. Historical examples abound, including Locke’s “tabula rasa,” Rousseau’s good “natural man” Emile, Jonathan Edwards’ very different “natural man” in original sin, and Dewey’s concept of the child in community. For Barnes, Waldorf schools attempt to educate according to Rudolf Steiner’s image of a human being:

In Steiner’s view, the human being can never be fully understood in terms of his heredity and the impact of his environment. Beyond them lies the essential core of human individuality, which cannot be defined in material terms. That central entity, the human ego, is perceived by Steiner to be supersensible and eternal, revealing itself by reflection in the personality who is active here in time and space. It is the educator’s responsibility to help this personality to develop in such a way that it can become a fitting vehicle through which the real ego can express itself. (326)

Note that Barnes refers to “educators” in the last sentence quoted, not to “Waldorf educators.” The virtual brand name “Waldorf” is a label attached after Steiner, not by Steiner. The label “Waldorf” represents an increasing objectification of ideas that were initially less defined and therefore more open to play and experiment than they often seem.

The words “in Steiner’s view” and “perceived by Steiner” are almost extraneous here. Steiner is certainly not the only nor the first person to speak of a human being as more than the sum of genes and environment. If he, and others who find the world this way, are correct, then inferences regarding education follow not from authority but from a perceived reality. Where reference to Steiner should be inserted in the quotation above is in the last sentence. “[For Steiner,] it is the educator’s responsibility...” Even here, Steiner is not unique, although his lectures and writings certainly constitute the most thorough and systematic approach to education from this perspective.

Barnes’ point is that the “supersensible and eternal” incarnate in the world, according to Steiner, gradually and in a specific fashion. Education, therefore, should be conducted in accordance with what is known about this process of incarnation. Hence, the methods and curricula derive from this view.

For Barnes, a second principle grows from the first; because the human self is seen to incarnate over a period of years, education must address this development, which is seen to occur in three broad stages lasting roughly seven years each. (Many writers on Waldorf education treat these as if they were universal, when Steiner himself made it clear time and again that he was describing something that was historically and culturally true, not true everywhere and for all time.) The method and curriculum similarly derive from these principles, and provide the particulars visible to any visitor to a Waldorf school, including instructional materials and subject matter. These will likely include relatively featureless rag dolls, beeswax crayons, watercolor paints, colored chalk, stories of Christian saints, Norse and Greek Myths, and any number of other things. But the rhetorical question still begs, does any of these make a Waldorf school?

Barnes’s consideration of methods and philosophy extends his definition beyond the merely synecdochical, but his discussion here speaks best to education in general, not to “Waldorf” education.

Oberman’s Objectification

Ida Oberman’s history of Waldorf education also offers an objectified view. For her, “Waldorf” is a “unique” “German” “progressive” “alternative” “reform initiative” or “institution” which has “embedded” in it “an ideology, a belief system called Anthroposophy.” All of these descriptions may apply to “Waldorf education,” but each could change radically without disturbing Steiner’s contributions to ways of teaching.

Oberman locates sources for the curriculum of the first Waldorf school in Steiner’s intellectual biography, but, having shown its somewhat contingent nature, then treats it as an object to be relocated wherever “Waldorf” roots. Oberman shows how different people—Hermann von Baravalle, Marie Steiner and Ita Wegman—and different schools—the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, the Kimberton Waldorf School, and the Sacramento Waldorf School—adopt different strategies (“purity,” “accommodation,” and “evolution”), but not how curricula reflect their origins in Steiner’s work and in the time and place of their implementation.

Among the evidence for this point of view is Oberman’s insertion of the bracketed qualifier “Waldorf” into a quotation in which it did not formerly appear: “The faculty now active at the school have proven...their willingness to continue this [Waldorf] work, which represents the noblest of German cultural life for all to see.” (1999. Emil Molt and Duke Fritz von Bothmer, p. 134) It is clear that Oberman sees the work as “Waldorf” work, but this is her own objectification.

A Third Strategy: School Functions

A third strategy involves some function or group of functions that Waldorf education performs (is claimed to perform). If the difficulty of the last definition is that it is too narrow—what is does not define what else may be—the difficulty of a functional definition is that it is too broad. Good education of any kind will necessarily perform certain functions that cannot simply be claimed for, let’s say, Waldorf education. Waldorf teachers are not the only teachers to claim a developmental view of their students, nor the only to find some aspects of human individuality that cannot be attributed solely to the interaction of heredity and the environment. Further, it does not appear that there is some unique set of functions that only something called Waldorf education performs.

Eugene Schwartz’s Functionalism

For Eugene Schwartz, Waldorf education is a method, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, who “begins with a qualitative intelligence that is unitary and suggests that the task of education is to multiply it. If [Howard] Gardner’s theory concerns itself with ‘multiple intelligences,’ then Steiner’s approach might be called ‘intelligent multiplicity.’” (151)

Further, Schwartz describes Waldorf education as a “‘will first’ pedagogy” or “methodology” that aims to “educate the child in accordance with principles that ask us to honor and work with the soul and spiritual nature of the youngster.” (157) While this sounds vague, it is only his introduction into a more specific examination of methods and techniques that teachers may use.

As for setting these ideas in a context as large as that of Barnes or Curran (see below), I don’t believe Schwartz sees this as a helpful goal; his more immediately practical goal is to show how Waldorf education can function to address the needs of children in a particular place and time. That is, he is concerned with the “will” education of children in wealthy industrialized countries.

A Look at the Map

Eugene Schwartz also approaches the function of Waldorf education by analogy. Like a map, Schwartz posits, a curriculum can be understood on three levels. The first, a global, geophysical map, remains valid for centuries. For Schwartz, Steiner’s description of child development is such a durable aspect of Waldorf education. Development itself may change, but only slowly. School subjects—history, math, and so forth—change more rapidly, and have been modified significantly over the decades since Waldorf education began. These are akin to a political map, which may change more rapidly. An up-to-date road map, however, must “come alive every day.” The clear advantage of Schwartz’ analogy is that it neatly allows for both relatively unchanging and continually changing aspects of Waldorf education. One danger of this view, however, is that agreement on the unchanging aspects of the map may be perceived as dogma—unchanging and therefore unquestioned. The history of geology shows, however, that while the earth appears to change slowly, our views and interpretations of that change can be revised radically from one year to the next. The notion that Waldorf education is a thing, however immaterial, has developed so surreptitiously over the past decades that we have not noticed the change. Our map has not changed much, perhaps, but we may be in danger of mistaking the map for the thing itself.

A Quality of Education

Each of the strategies outlined above makes Waldorf education into a thing, whether a material thing like a school, or an ideological thing like a movement, or a mental thing like a function. Not all writers on Waldorf education, however, resort to these three strategies. Those who perceive Waldorf education not as a thing but as a quality of education demonstrate a different possibility for description.

Peter Curran on Waldorf Education

Peter Curran, graduate of Bowdoin College and long-time history teacher at The Waldorf School of Garden City, adopts a strategy similar to Barnes’s in describing Waldorf education, but then ventilates it immediately to include, potentially, all schools, not a particular subset. Following his retirement in the late 1980s, Curran set down some of his ideas about Waldorf schools. Particularly, he believed that there were four “essentials,” “without which no school (by whatever name) is a Waldorf School and with which any school is a Waldorf School.”

I. …As each child’s consciousness matures, it recapitulates the cultural epochs of all Mankind. Waldorf education agrees with Emerson when he says that all children go through a Greek period and a Roman period, etc. There is, then, a proper time and method for particular subjects to be taught.
II. Since no one destroys what one loves, reverence, awe and respect for the Earth should be fostered. An inkling of the spirituality of the Earth then comes into being.
III. The qualitative, as well as the quantitative, in all things should be equally developed.
IV. Above all, Man is known as a spiritual as well as a physical being.

Curran’s statement poses a realism to Barnes’s nominalism in that the enactment of these principles does not depend on the presence or absence of the name “Waldorf.”

Of Curran’s four principles, the first and last are potentially controversial, while the middle two may be found in many classrooms and schools. The first, the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” statement, is probably the least familiar to most educators, and it may be the most dated, arising out of Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being”. (See, for example, Lovejoy, 1936 and 1964) Few, if any, schools other than Waldorf schools today organize themselves around such a principle. Still, there is nothing to prevent them doing so if they choose. (Nor, if Waldorf schools found a different central metaphor, would they necessarily cease to be good schools.)

Last, some contemporary interpretations of the anti-establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might prevent Curran’s fourth principle from being overtly applied in public schools, but the concept is hardly unique among independent schools. Some Waldorf teachers may argue that principle four may be found in many schools, but that Waldorf schools mean something different by “spirit”. I’m not convinced of this, however, and, in any event, it needn’t be so.

Douglas Sloan’s “Education of the Imagination”

Douglas Sloan, retired Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, NY, worked diligently through writing and teaching to present an open-minded approach to Waldorf education. In Insight-Imagination, he describes Waldorf education sensitively in his discussion of a larger “education of the imagination.” (211)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) wrote of the “primacy of perception”: “all consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves… The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” (13) For Sloan, the faculty of “imagination” necessarily accompanies perception, without which we would live in William James’ “buzzing, blooming confusion.” For Sloan, imagination is not simply one faculty among others—empathy or cognition, say--to be strengthened through an enhanced curriculum. Imagination is the necessary wellspring of human experience of the world:

…it is only through imagination that we have any knowledge whatsoever. …The imagination, the image-making power of the mind …shapes our everyday perception of the world, for there is no perception separate from interpretation. (140)

Similarly to Barnes, Sloan describes Waldorf education according to a conception of educational stages. After briefly examining Piaget with regard to stages, however, Sloan qualifies his statements: “Any conception of educational stages must… stand constantly ready to be reevaluated and revised in the light of new evidence from any field of research….” (212) For Sloan, Waldorf education does not approach a faith, nor was it created ready-made by Rudolf Steiner, to be preserved in perpetuity like a Colonial reenactment. “Such a conception of education must as a whole remain open and subject to revision….” (212) Waldorf education is an evolving model of educational thinking, research and practice, and must be created anew in each application if it is not to devolve into prescription or dogma.

Nancy Parsons Whittaker’s Open Door Policy

Nancy Parsons Whittaker is a translator of Steiner’s work into English and a founder and administrator of “www.bobnancy.com”, a website devoted to Waldorf education. The paragraphs that follow do not set forth a thing-like definition, but attempt to throw open the doors of a somewhat cloistered “movement”:

I believe that the educational movement Steiner founded drifted very far from its source the moment [the act of] founding schools became more important than examining the quality of education the children were receiving and working to really convey the approach to other teachers in all manner of schools and situations. What we call “Waldorf Education” has largely come to mean a set of curricula and specific ways of introducing specific subject matter. This has nothing (in my opinion) to do with the original intent, which was to convey the attitude, the viewpoint toward the children and toward society (any society) with which a teacher could fully meet the physical, mental and spiritual needs of both the students and their community.

Any school is a Waldorf school if the intent of Steiner’s pedagogy is being met within its halls. What was the intent? The intent was to offer an education in a way that gave each child a fundamental, true introduction into the foundation of his or her society while at the same time enhancing that child’s ability to accurately perceive life around him or her without damaging the child’s innate capacity to be sensitively aware of the Creative Love behind the visible world (whatever that capacity might have been, whether large, small or nearly nonexistent—the teaching was not intended to train a student’s spiritual vision, just not to damage what already existed). The education was not intended to found schools separated from their society at large nor was it intended to model a particular belief system.

These goals can be met in a wide variety of settings, with an infinitely wide possibility of curricula, through the myriad possibilities of human personality.

A Necessary Lack of Definition

I used to have a bumper sticker that read “Waldorf Education” on two lines, “Waldorf” above and “Education” below. I returned to long-term parking after a research trip to discover that someone had neatly sliced off the word “Waldorf”, who knows why, leaving a narrow bumper sticker that read simply: “Education”. I started to remove it but stopped. It’s still on my car.

Those who aim deliberately not to objectify Waldorf education can avoid the pitfalls of reification, synecdoche, or function. These writers necessarily leave Waldorf education undefined, and characterize it in refreshingly open terms. Waldorf education becomes not a thing, not a kind or brand of education, but a quality of education. And qualities, like colors, like the warmth of a heart, may expand boundlessly.

Conclusion

Steiner relates the following anecdote about his time in the Waldorf School: “Whenever I come to Stuttgart to visit and assist in the guidance of the school, I ask the same question in each class, naturally within the appropriate context and avoiding any possible tedium, ‘Children, do you love your teachers?’ You should hear and witness the enthusiasm with which they call out in chorus, ‘Yes!’ This call to the teachers to engender love within their pupils is all part of the question of how the older generation should relate to the young.” (1995)

We are all older than some and younger than others; we learn from some and we teach others. If we foster the relationship Steiner describes here, then we participate in an education that honors the memory of Rudolf Steiner.

References

Barnes, H. (1980) An introduction to waldorf education. In Teachers College Record, 81 (3), Spring 1980; pp. 322-336,
Curran, P. (1990) Unpublished typescript.
Emerson, R. (1966) Education. In Emerson on education: Selections, H. Jones (Ed.). Teachers College Press: New York.
Lovejoy, A. (1936 and 1964) The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The primacy of perception and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics, J. Edie (Ed.) Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Oberman, I. (1999) Fidelity and flexibility in Waldorf education, 1919-1998. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services.
St. Charles, Dorothy, interview by Alan Chartock, WAMC radio, 90.3 FM, Albany, NY, April 1994.
Schwartz, E. (1999) Millennial child: Transforming education in the twenty-first century. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Sloan, D. (1983) Insight-Imagination: The emancipation of thought and the modern world. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
Steiner, R. (1965) The education of the child in the light of anthroposophy, G. & M. Adams (Trans.) Rudolf Steiner Press: New York.
Steiner, R. (1995) The fundamentals of waldorf education. November 11, 1921. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1: Nine Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Steiner, R. (1996) Why base education on anthroposophy? June 30, 1923. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 2: Twelve Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Talbott, S. (1995) The future does not compute: Transcending the machines in our midst. O’Reilly and Associates: Sebastopol, CA.
Whittaker, N. (2001) Post to subscribers of the list server Waldorf@maelstrom.stjohns.edu., Feb. 11. Subscribe at http://www.bobnancy.com. Quoted with author’s permission.

So-Called "Spiritual Science"

We may swoon with delight or crinkle our noses in disgust at the term "spiritual science," but we should know its origins before we embrace or discount it.

If your daughter told you she was studying humanities in college could you imagine having the same reactions? "Geisteswissenschaft," literally, "spiritual science," refers in German universities to what we call the humanities. It's that simple.

Some claim that Husserl and Steiner, among others, use the term in a "new way," but I would argue that, if anything, they're actually reclaiming its older sense. That is, they aim to understand literature, philosophy, history--the humanities--as clearly and objectively as natural scientists aim to understand the natural world.

Whether or not they succeed, whether or not we agree with their method or findings, this was their project. Owen Barfield sometimes described his work in history and philosphy as aiming at a "science of meaning." I believe this is exactly what Steiner meant by spiritual science, and what we (used to) mean when we studied the humanities.

What are the alternatives to a science of meaning ("science" derives from Latin for "knowledge")? Accept the universe as meaningless? Teach that we each "create our own meaning"? I know it's wimpy not to accept these hard "truths," but, of course, they're not truths, they're assumptions. And I will hold them as such--possibilities not demonstrated--while I pursue the humanities.

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.