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.

Representations of Waldorf Education VI: Millennial Child

The three strongest complementary and intertwined themes of Millennial Child are these: that education at the turn of the millennium should address, above all, children's will; that education should increasingly concern itself with young--preschool and elementary age--children; and that Waldorf education offers the most appropriate curriculum or pedagogy with which to address these children.

To argue these points, Eugene Schwartz constructs an interpretation of history in which literacy, promoted first in Europe by Charlemagne, grows through the middle ages to the founding of the first universities. The general path since then for European culture, Schwartz argues, has been for educators to concern themselves with increasingly younger children. We have seen the rise and decline of the present conventional curriculum of the “three Rs,” Schwartz says, and the Waldorf curriculum, broadly conceived, is “the” curriculum, now in its infancy, that will grow to become the new tradition or convention.

Following Rudolf Steiner’s picture of child development, this increasing concern with the education of young children winds its way down from the intellectual concerns of university and, later, high school students through a concern with the emotions, feelings and imaginations of older elementary school students, to Schwartz’s present concern with the will-education of young children.

(It is interesting to note, as Joan Almon, 1999, has pointed out, that the original Waldorf School in Stuttgart had a kindergarten for approximately half of one school year during Steiner’s lifetime, run by Elizabeth Grunelius, who later worked at several schools in the United States. Steiner’s education lectures generally concern children age seven and older, although he did speak extensively about child development during the first seven years of life. The point is, much of the preschool curriculum in Waldorf schools has been worked out and implemented after Steiner’s death.)

In tracing this history, Schwartz relies on an interpretation of history that sees decades, centuries and millennia divided into thirds. Further, in his scheme, the first third of each period concerns particularly thinking, the second third concerns feeling, and the last third, will. Given this picture the change of the present millennium sees a triple-threat in the realm of will: the end of a decade, a century and a millennium. Schwartz’s argument is strongest with regard to generations of approximately 33 years each. Historians, whether they subscribe to them or not, are almost universally familiar with interpretations according to generations. Our decade-obsessed and label-conscious 20th century seems especially open to arguments based on generations. Less familiar are Schwartz’s divisions of century and millennium, and readers will have to validate Schwartz’s claims here according to their own experience. I am unfamiliar with such arguments and can find little basis to substantiate them in Steiner’s work, but am unwilling to dismiss them out of hand. If there are esoteric sources for these ideas, Schwartz has not cited them.

Schwartz’s most significant example of his historical structure is the metamorphosis of Freud’s thought in the first third of the century into feeling--particularly as expressed in the work of Dr. Spock, a closet Freudian--in the middle of the century, and finding expression in the will in the last part of the century. I find myself arguing, however, that the thought of the behaviorists in the first third of the century (and after), of Piaget in the middle third (and after), and of systems theorists in the last third, each greatly intellectual, have had at least as much influence in education as has the thought of Freud, especially outside the Northeastern United States.

Further, Schwartz finds powerful evidence for the necessity of a will-oriented education in the spate of diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), characterized by “overactivity, restlessness, distractibility, and short attention span, especially in young children.” In short, ADHD represent the social and historical problem of “uncontrolled will.” Schwartz traces the rise of ADHD and the disorders from which it grew--“minimal brain dysfunction” and “hyperkinetic reactions of childhood”--over the past thirty years or so. He lays out clearly diagnoses and treatments based on perceived chemical, emotional and behavioral causes. By adding a fourth category, “multiple causes,” which must be addressed holistically and phenomenologically, Schwartz recognizes an ego disorder (as opposed to the physical, etheric or astral disorders implied by previous causes).

His discussion, however, may not go far enough. He skates around the clear possibility that ADHD is culturally produced. Here Freud offers an excellent example: He made his reputation in Vienna treating women suffering from “hysterical paralysis,” a psychological disease produced by upper middle class culture in Vienna in the late 1800s. The symptoms--usually paralysis of the hands and forearms--were real and debilitating, but they, and their diagnosis and treatment, disappeared with changed roles for women in society shortly after the turn of the century. The point is, ADHD is likely a similar malady. Plop enough kids in front of various phosphorescent screens long enough, at home and at school, feed them on Fritos and water them on caffeinated soda, remove them from meaningful participation in family and community life and they’ll likely deserve an ADHD diagnosis. As the eminent developmental psychologist Howard Gruber says, “It’s the schools that have ADHD, not the kids.” And, we might add, also the homes, restaurants, playgrounds and day-care centers. Strong evidence for this claim lies in the fact that ADHD affects boys, primarily (just as anorexia nervosa and bulimia affect girls, primarily). Teachers and therapists obviously have to deal with what confronts them, but to argue for treatment of symptoms--even with the most anthroposophic, phenomenological, holistic approach--without addressing the larger cultural and social context points education once again in the dangerous direction of asking teachers to solve society’s ills (see Traub 2000).

A final concern is that Steiner’s words about education and child development regard fully the first twenty-one years or so of life. If we must adopt the language of crisis in discussing education, then that crisis cuts across all ages. The will education of young children, at home and in school, matures potentially into freedom, but the education of adolescents in love and intellect matures potentially into true regard for universal brotherhood, according to Steiner. Is it possible to say that one is more important today than another? Schwartz’s good assumption is that ADHD, teen violence, and other modern maladies of adolescence are better addressed years, not days, before they manifest themselves. Schwartz pursues his discussion with virtually no reference, however, to high school-age children. “Waldorf education” in Millennial Child must be translated as “Waldorf education up to the age of about fourteen.” Readers first encountering Waldorf education in these pages--and Schwartz’s intended audience, it seems, is primarily one that has an interest in but little familiarity with Waldorf education--will find it difficult to conceive of a Waldorf high school education at all. To this extent, Millennial Child propagates a somewhat abbreviated view of Waldorf education.

Toward the end of Millennial Child, Schwartz quotes Steiner: “The Waldorf School is not an ‘alternative’ school like so many others founded in the belief that they will correct all the errors of one kind or another in education. It is founded on the idea that the best principles and the best will in this field can come into effect only if the teacher understands human nature.” Some mainstream educators may well accept Schwartz’s assertion that the time is ripe for a new, appropriately post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, even post-Modern educational form. The recurring arguments, experiments and crises in education in the last century or so are possibly the death throes of the school of the past. The force of Schwartz’s argument, however, lies not in the prescription of the brand, “Waldorf education,” with which many educators would rightly take offence, but in the recognition of the historical, social and individual necessity for an education, of whatever name, that is based on the wisdom of humanity.

In its attempt to re-engage in a conversation with educators outside the circle of Waldorf schools and in its re-interpretation of Waldorf education to address immediate social concerns (ADHD), Schwartz’s book represents the generation of schools that I call Variations.

Representations of Waldorf Education II: The Creation of Waldorf Education

I have called the object of my study here “Waldorf education”, but history shows that even that term, well accepted today, came into being only gradually. A. C. Harwood’s title and index do not contain the word “Waldorf,” he does not use the phrase “Waldorf education” at all, and he refers only infrequently to “Waldorf schools”, and then only as representing or modeling the “educational work” or “philosophy” of Rudolf Steiner. I enclose the term philosophy in scare quotes because of my conviction that Steiner’s work does not constitute primarily a philosophy, but a methodology. Steiner deals with epistemological and ontological questions, for example, (see especially Philosophy of Freedom 1970) but his primary concern is the attainment of knowledge, not that knowledge itself, and a description of being, not a theory of it.

John Gardner does not examine this point explicitly, but he does refer primarily to Steiner’s “educational method.” He refers to Waldorf schools and Waldorf education only in the central essay of the book, “The Experience of Knowledge,” the single essay in which he is at pains to view Waldorf schools as models for the implementations of Steiner’s method. The connotation here, different from the present as we shall see, is that Steiner’s method is not synonymous with the existence of education or schools that call themselves “Waldorf.” In the “Foreword to the Second Edition” (1996), Gardner himself employs the word “Waldorf” in quotation marks. “I believe strongly in the excellence and soundness of the new insights that stand behind the ‘Waldorf’ impulse in education; but I am less than enthusiastic about accepting the name generally used to designate this impulse, for it gives no clue as to what the new beginning actually intends or involves,” he continues (12-13). Gardner would likely have agreed that any teacher and any school could, with good will, employ the model we have come to know as Waldorf education. (Cf. Emmet, B. (undated) From Farm to School: The Founding of the High Mowing School).

M. C. Richards objectifies Waldorf education far more than these first two authors do. She refers to “Rudolf Steiner Education,” “Waldorf Education,” and “Waldorf schooling” interchangeably. Her tacit assumption, one that she represents in her generation, is that Waldorf education, the curriculum, principles and practices of Waldorf schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, have a kind of concrete reality that is missing from considerations of earlier authors. The subtle irony here is that her commitment to “become undivisive in our science, our emotions, our creativity—to live in the paradox of separateness and connection…” (156) is initially undermined by her acceptance of the objective existence of something called Waldorf education.

By 1999, Eugene Schwartz’ index contains the following entries: Waldorf approach, Waldorf education, Waldorf high school, Waldorf kindergarten, Waldorf kindergarten playground, Waldorf main lesson, Waldorf method, Waldorf nursery teachers, Waldorf Room [sic], Waldorf school pupils, Waldorf schools, and Waldorf teachers. The process of objectification, clearly, does not end with the creation of one object, but threatens to continue indefinitely. Continued ad absurdam, the process would produce a “separate but equal” parallel “Waldorf” universe. Schwartz, of course, is not responsible for this onslaught of terminology; his vocabulary is simply the one available to him, and the points he examines concern other aspects of education (see below).

The objectification of Waldorf education is not an inherently reprehensible process. It eases discussion of important issues in education and creates a core around which communities of teachers, students, parents and others may form. Although I raise the issue here, I have also relied on the term throughout this work. On the other hand, carried too far, objectification threatens to dichotomize an idea that, at least initially, opposed such a split. Discussion of Waldorf education, once created as an object, then poses itself “against” other forms of education, forms that must themselves be objectified even to be allowed into the discussion. Further, communities gathered around such an unquestioned, objectified idea may become insular. This process traces the rise of a fundamentalism to which Waldorf communities are certainly not immune. In a small way, the separation of “Waldorf” ideas about teaching and learning from more conventional or accepted ideas mirrors, for example, the separation of Protestantism from Catholicism in the 16th century.

I have traced this process of objectification briefly with reference to a few books, but these are simply symptomatic of a wider process. The creation of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), also exemplifies this process. The Association began with informal conferences of about a dozen Waldorf schools in the mid-1960s and continued through a formal incorporation around 1980. (I have been unable to ascertain the exact year of the founding of AWSNA.) Since then, the Association has trademarked the name “Waldorf” as it applies to education in the United States, categorized schools by affiliation status, decided that public schools cannot be Waldorf schools, and, most recently, become an accrediting body for Waldorf schools. This gradual institutionalization, necessary or helpful as it may have been to those involved, also charts the development of an exclusive educational precipitate, “Waldorf schools.”

As Waldorf education became more established in the United States, its promise as a model for education generally was compromised, in part, by its objectification. By coming to reside, or to be seen to reside, in specific schools only, it forsook its status as a way to discuss how teachers teach and children learn, and became much more than that; an exclusive culture and institution. This process may be traced through the books that I will now examine in more detail.

Before I proceed to the books themselves, however, I should point out three things. First, although the Steiner School in New York City opened in 1928, I am unaware of any book-length considered descriptive works in English on Waldorf education—separate from translations of Steiner’s works—before Edmund’s of 1947 and Harwood’s of 1958. This may reflect two characteristics of early practice: A thorough engagement with Steiner’s work itself, especially including the translation of German material into English, and an active struggle in the few small schools and classrooms to survive from day to day and year to year, a struggle that left little time or energy for book-length reflections.

Second, especially because each of the books I will examine is born of experience, not, for example, of theorizing, agenda-setting, or policy-making, each book represents a culmination of life in a school or of thinking about education. For example, John Gardner’s book was published in 1975, the year he retired after twenty-five years as Faculty Chair of the Waldorf School of Garden City. It is not a state-of-the-art examination, but a reflection of roughly the years 1950-1975. This point may seem obvious, but it points to the value of the books I will examine as historical artifacts. Each is a “summing up” of years prior to publication.

Third, although each successive author almost definitely knew of those preceding him or her, the later of these works contain few references to the others’ books (M. C. Richards refers readers to Harwood’s book once, and Eugene Schwartz acknowledges a couple of contributions from John Gardner, but they seem to refer to personal conversations and not to published work). This is odd given the very few works that aim at any sort of general description of Waldorf education, but may be understandable given the changing needs for a general work. Rather than sources or influences (or opportunities for rebuttal), previous works may simply be so much ink under the printing press, so to speak.

Representations of Waldorf Education I: Four Books, Four Generations

NOTE: This post is more than 8000 words, so I have posted it in 8 sections.

In chronological order, The Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work of Rudolf Steiner (Harwood 1958), The Experience of Knowledge: Essays on American Education (Gardner 1975), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America (Richards 1980), and Millennial Child: Transforming Education in the Twenty-first Century (Schwartz 1999), represent four distinct phases or generations of Waldorf education in the United States. I have chosen to call these generations: 1.) Europeans; 2.) Americans; 3.) Alternatives; and 4.) Variations. (Regarding the inadequacy of the name of the latest generation, any history that attempts to approach the present will necessarily stumble as it nears its goal. I leave it to the future to rename appropriately the contemporary generation when—or if—its character becomes clear. Also, it seems to me, attempts to categorize many things leave a last category, “other”, that serves to demonstrate the ultimate inadequacy of categorizations such as I have undertaken here. This does not contradict the value or utility of taking a stab at it nonetheless.)

These generations mirror closely, although this occurred to me years after first conceiving of them, the generalized generations of historians described as “conflict,” “consensus,” and “plural.” Very simply, many historians, led perhaps by Charles Beard (1913/1986), largely before the Second World War, saw historical change growing out of class conflicts as well as political theory. Even the small presence of Waldorf schools in the United States before World War II shows evidence of this conflict view in the struggle to translate a European, especially German, working-class education for, especially, a New York Upper East Side clientele. Consensus historians, largely after World War II, emphasized common purpose in the movement of history, describing the Continental Congress as, in John P. Roche’s phrase, a “reform caucus,” for example (in Higham 1962). Similarly, having found a more or less secure footing in the U.S., those who thought about Waldorf education after the War described it, for example, as offering a balance to the pendulum swings between traditional and progressive modes of education. (see Gardner 1975). The “new” pluralistic history abjures large-scale syntheses and throws the field open to a multi-faceted approach that includes history “from the bottom up” and consideration of previously marginalized groups (see, among others, Lemsich 1968). And during this period, from the mid-1960s on, Waldorf schools began increasingly to portray themselves not as fellow-travelers in search of educational answers, but as (self-) marginalized institutions themselves. Recently, since 1990 or so, hard to characterize briefly, Waldorf teachers and schools find themselves examining issues from the role of Waldorf education in public school systems and juvenile corrections to the separation of church (and school) and state. (See, for example, Smith, undated, and Oppenheimer 1999.)

The ease with which Waldorf generations may be shoehorned into a simple historiography suggests two things: First, that changes in historical interpretation must themselves be historicized to consider how the practice of history reflects broader contemporaneous social concerns; and, second, that the fit between my object of study and this view of historical interpretation probably calls the simplicity of that historiography into question more than it validates my descriptions.

The books I examine here do not constitute a canon in the literature of Waldorf education; rather, they are among the few works that attempt to portray Waldorf education generally for an audience that is largely unfamiliar with it. Three more works that might be included here but are not, for example, are Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf Impulse (Edmunds 1947), Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Easton 1975), and Insight-Imagination: The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Sloan 1983). Edmunds’ work, although it appeared originally a decade before Harwood’s, is largely superceded by Harwood’s more thorough investigation. The works of Easton and Sloan largely regard topics other than Waldorf education, although each book contains a chapter or an extensive appendix on Waldorf education.

Further, a large and growing body of literature examines or extends aspects of Waldorf practices, curricula and methodologies, but works in this mode usually assume some familiarity with Waldorf education itself, familiarity that can be gained through Steiner’s work, experience in Waldorf schools, or the more primary texts examined here. Although these works as well might be examined to tease out the historical context in which they were written, to do so would likely not add much to the discussion I will begin here.

Although the generations I will describe are gross generalizations, they represent both a chronological progression and changing views of the promises and compromises, the possibilities, tensions and unsettled questions, entailed by the effort to interpret Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas for a United States clientele.

Teachers wrote all the books examined here, although not all were teachers in Waldorf schools, (M. C. Richards taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, for example) and they attempt to examine or characterize education broadly. They may describe classroom experience and practice, but their goal is to address educational questions beyond simple descriptions of Steiner’s ideas in practice. As these questions change—from a seemingly simple first comprehensive English introduction to Steiner’s ideas, through an Emersonian examination of fundamental questions of the meanings of education in the assumed context of the Cold War and a re-casting of Waldorf education as an educational form that mirrors the growing New Age, to an indictment of misapplications of child psychology in education, for example—a history emerges that shows Waldorf education changing in changing contexts. Waldorf education appears, then, not as a monolithic tablet on which the answers to an educational debate are inscribed, but as a responsive partner in a dialogue. Admittedly, this partner has been virtually silent in the United States for the past seventy years or so, but no less thoughtful or observant for that. Further, even the term “Waldorf education” has its own history.