The Anthroposophical Writer of the English Language Must Read This

Too many anthroposophists adopt the style of (badly translated) German in writing for an American audience. Here's some advice on avoiding this clunky and annoying style:

Germans capitalize Nouns. Americans capitalize only proper nouns; anthroposophy is not a proper noun and should not be capitalized, nor should any number of other nouns translated from German into English.

Germans are a definite people and use definite articles more frequently than Americans do. A German (Steiner) could write a book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. Three definite articles in a ten word title. Educating Children sounds less stilted to American ears. Teaching Children is even better, and, by the way, the word "pedagogical" is archaic in English.

Germans, as definite people, also speak definitely, using "must," for example, far more frequently than Americans do. What is common in Germany sounds almost impolite, and certainly too commanding and definite, to Americans.

Further, especially with regard to Steiner's lectures from the early 20th century, the style of argument is often to indicate the extreme, recognizing that the audience understands this as a definite boundary within which action will (must!) occur. When Steiner says, for instance, that teaching abstract concepts too early will "ruin a (the) child's soul," he is not saying that one teacher in one instance will curdle the soul the way one undissolved piece of sugar will crystalize a batch of fudge, or one dust mite may ruin a computer chip. He is indicating, in a culturally appropriate way that we need to translate, that such activity, pursued in the wrong way, over time, will lead us in a direction that is unhealthy for children (the child).

It is already enough. We must now stop this activity by the conscious retranslation of the concepts and the language we use to describe our engagement with anthroposophy. Not to do this simply demonstrates our superficial understanding (our misunderstanding).

Do you have to be an anthroposophist to teach in a Waldorf school?

No.

(And, to answer the question in Comments below, it depends on the program in which you're getting your Waldorf teacher education--they vary considerably and there's no standard or template--and it also depends on what your definition of "studying anthroposophy" is--if you mean reading Steiner's work in areas outside education, that's one thing. If you mean reading any of Steiner's works, including those in education, that's another...)

We are Plato's Cave Men and Cave Women

A student asked me to write this up, so here goes.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is just that, an allegory. We mistake it, then, if we try to identify ourselves or others as, say, prisoners. We are all prisoners, but we are also all, to some extent, those who have freed themselves.

For those not familiar with this allegory, I’ll review it. You can find it in Book VII of Plato’s Republic.* Find a contemporary translation. The language should sound fresh, immediate, direct. Plato did not write or speak in archaic or stuffy language. (Grube’s translation is good.)

Imagine that we are prisoners in a cave, chained so that we can see only the rear wall. We cannot see our neighbors, or even our own bodies. Reality, for us, consists of the shadows on and echoes from the cave wall. If we push the allegory, we could say that even our own thoughts, while we are thus chained, are only the shadows and echoes of true thoughts. We have been chained since before we can remember, and we believe that reality consists of the shadows and echoes that we perceive.

If we are able to free ourselves, however, we notice that there is a fire behind us on an elevated platform. Between the fire and us is a low wall that disguises beings who carry objects back and forth, holding them aloft so that the fire casts their shadows on the back of the cave. The prisoners take these to be real.

But, recognizing our mistake, although we are now free, we have not yet seen reality. We need to make our way up a path and out of the cave, into the real world, to recognize the source for the objects of which we had previously seen only the shadows. To be clear—because many who refer to this allegory leave out the middle portion, referring only to prisoners and then their apprehension of the world outside the cave—when we were prisoners, we saw the shadows of images of the things that are real. And, to take common experience, the sun that we see in the sky, the brightest thing in common experience, it is, by this allegory, only the shadow of the image of the true sun.

Emerging from the cave, having spent a lifetime in darkness, we are blinded by the light. It takes time for our vision to adjust, to be able to see in this new, true world.

Then, when we embrace the task of returning to the cave to free those still imprisoned, we are blinded a second time as we pass from light to darkness. To the perception of the prisoners, then, we appear to be blind and to have lost our minds, unable to see the shadows and babbling about a world of which they have no conception. They see no value in our attempts to free them, and may, Plato tells us, turn on us and try to kill us if we persist in attempts to free them.

Also, having seen the world outside the cave, we have lost interest in the now meaningless shadows of images. When we see prisoners competing over shadows, we withdraw, we decline to join this fruitless activity.

Our task, then, becomes a task of education, of gradually turning the prisoners’ minds and sight—these are inextricably linked—to the light of the real.

I don’t want to argue about whether or not this is a good allegory—it has survived more than 2000 years—or whether or not it promotes authoritarianism—those who know leading those who don’t. I want to argue that, as an allegory, it applies in all its parts to each of us.

Each of us is, in some respects, deluded, a prisoner who takes shadows for reality.

Each of us, too, is somewhat free, has turned at least slightly to see the fire and the objects that cast the shadows, has begun to recognize his or her imprisonment.

Each of us has, if only in rare, powerful dreams or fleeting, high ideals, glimpsed the world outside the cave.

Each of us has been blinded by light and blinded by darkness.

Each has returned to others in the cave to help them.

Each has benefited from the work of others to bring us closer to freedom and reality.

Can we say it’s not so?


*Plato, in his humility and in order to indulge a powerful rhetorical device, claims not to record his own thoughts and words, but those of his teacher, Socrates. This is why Plato is the author of the Socratic dialogues. In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates speaks to Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, whose name means “bright eyed” or “owl eyed,” an apt and symbolic name for the allegory laid out in the dialogue.

Good Teachers Don't Answer Their Own Questions

Once Harry Kretz asks a question, he stands and he waits. You can see that he is willing to wait while civilizations rise and fall, oceans dry up, stars die and fall from the sky, the universe rumbles to an end, bang or whimper. He’s present, attentive, with his students, but waiting. He has asked a real question that a real student needs to answer for a real reason. Not to prolong a class, or to demonstrate knowledge, or to be pedantic, but because he’s teaching young human beings and it’s necessary for them to exercise themselves, to rouse their minds to activity, to make connections for themselves. Mr. Kretz asks a question that requires students to engage, to think, to draw new connections, to make an insightful leap across a previously uncrossed gap.

Mr. Kretz, one of the finest teachers I have known—patient, respectful, humorous—will tell you that many teachers, especially young, smart ones, don’t really know how to ask questions. “Don’t ask a question that you don’t actually care if the students answer,” he might say. And, once you’ve asked a question that you believe students should answer, don’t do what too many of us do. We wait a couple of seconds and then, impatient, the onrushing momentum of an un-taught curriculum or the threat of silence or of boredom upon us, we answer it for ourselves. And our students relax back into watching the teacher’s show.

“Er. Um.” A student hazards a guess, voice rising at the end, questioning. Mr. Kretz absorbs this answer and asks another question.

(Speaking of leaps, Helen Keller compared leaps of mind and dancing. Here’s Merce Cunningham from Russell Friedman’s biography of Martha Graham: “[I] felt [Helen Keller’s] two hands around my waist, like bird wings, so soft. I began to do small jumps. Her fingers, still around my waist, moved slightly as though fluttering. I stopped, and was able to understand what she said to her companion: ‘So light, like the mind.’” Sometimes, poetic truth and literal truth are the same thing.)

Two Students: Tom won't learn, Huck won't hate

A quirky student, brilliant in some respects and challenged in others, I’ll call him Tom, was given the German Seifenoper, “soap opera,” as a vocabulary word, one among many. Probably because it appeared in a story the class was reading.

Tom refused to learn it. “I know that I will never need to know the German word for soap opera, so I refuse to learn it.” No amount of pleading or reasoning would sway him, not that the German teacher tried too hard; this situation was ultimately more amusing than annoying, and she had better uses for her own time. She could have pointed out that he would learn two potentially more valuable words--for soap and for opera--in one swell foop, but she didn't.

Wow. Think of the energy, commitment, and bent of mind it takes to examine each piece of information coming at you in school in order to determine, before you engage with it, whether or not it will be of use to you in the future. As if you could really ever know such a thing. Approaching education as if packing for a trip, and knowing you have to be ruthless in order to pack light. “I’ll learn this. I won’t learn that.” There’s an admirable, ethical stance at the core of Tom’s refusal, even if the project itself is wholly questionable.

I heard about this, and spoke to Tom. “I’m tempted to write a short story,” I told him, “in which a boy in a circumstance similar to yours loses his life because he doesn’t know the German word for soap opera. In my story, he’ll live if he knows this word, but he won’t know it, and he’ll die. It’s unlikely, of course, but you have to admit it could happen.”

(So you don’t believe I’m too harsh, I had spoken with the class about how it’s the case in literature and movies that so many people die because it’s an easy way to introduce dramatic tension. We care if the hero lives or dies. It’s harder to write a story or shoot a movie in which we care if the hero… brushes his teeth or not.)

He smiled. He understood my point. But he didn’t change his ways, not then, and, maybe, not now.

Another boy, I’ll call him Huck, was very quick to solve math problems, although he did it in a remarkable way. He would read a problem, and then attack it three, four, five, or more ways, getting sometimes the right answers, if the methods were sound, and sometimes the wrong answer. He would examine all the different answers and then decide which he believed to be correct. Trial and error. Not a perfectionist, almost an imperfectionist.

A girl in the same class, I’ll call her Becky, approached problem-solving more conventionally, working carefully step-by-step until she was certain she had the right answer. A perfectionist.

One day, I set the class a problem. Huck worked quickly to the answer and announced that he had it. Becky, working methodically, looked up and said, exasperated, “I hate you, Huck.”

Huck sat back and looked at her. “Well, Becky, I don’t hate you,” he said. “I guess you suffer from unrequited hate.”

Lessons from the Tide Pools of Hermit Island, Maine

Each fall I take our senior class to Hermit Island, Maine, on the coast near Bath, to study tide pool zoology for a week. We set up camp amid birch and pine trees and within the sound of the surf—boys’ and girls’ tents, a couple of picnic tables for a “kitchen” and a couple more for a “dining room.” We stretch a tarp overhead—it rains at least once during the week—and a clothesline nearby. We circle folding chairs around the fire pit and grill steaks.

We talk late into the night. The first night, students chatter and let fall away the social and electronic world they have just left behind. The second night, more calmly, we discuss the world they are about to enter and how to make it a better place. They can allow their idealism free reign, stare into the fire, and imagine how, given a chance, they will change the world. They jump up to sing, they sit quietly to write a poem, they whittle spoons, they—hesitantly—chase skunks away from the food they have forgotten to pack away.

In the morning, students make breakfast—they’re responsible for planning, cooking, and cleaning for all meals. For some, it’s a challenge to get instant oatmeal on the table; others present a restaurant-worthy vegetarian frittata. We hike half a mile to the “Kelp Shed,” a snack bar in the summer and our classroom in the fall, where we meet about 100 seniors from other high schools across the country. Students have come from as far south as Atlanta and as far west as Chicago.

Each morning, teachers from the eight or so schools that have gathered share two-hour presentations on the animal phyla of the tide pools. (I’ve co-taught mollusks for the past three years with a teacher from Vermont.) Students take notes, make drawings, ask questions, and have a chance to examine live specimens they’ve helped collect.

Students are delighted by hermit crabs, intrigued by a sea star’s hydrodynamic tube feet, awed by the relative power of a little clam’s single foot, slightly scared of the crabs’ pinchers—although there are always a couple of students who hang as many crabs as possible from their clothes and skin. Students spend a morning with lobsters, learning about migrations, territorial disputes, mating rituals, and lobster offspring, the superlobsters. Many students name their lobsters—highly unscientific, but understandable—and one purchases it in order to give it its freedom.

The rhythm of life revolves around the tides. We wake in time to be at the tide pools near low tide, sometimes five in the morning. We coach students in walking on the sharp rocks and slippery seaweed, in watching out for rogue waves. We peer into tide pools that appear at first to contain nothing but gray-green blobs.

We’re far from home, we’re tired, we’re not necessarily dressed for the weather, we’re awake when we’d rather not be, we’re uncertain of our footing, we’re cold and wet, and we’re just not sure why we are here. “Dr. Sagarin, I feel like a clam and I don’t want to be a clam. Now I know why they call it ‘clammy.’”

Each year, it amazes me how, within about twenty minutes, our vision begins to clear, and we begin to see and then to identify plant and animal life in the pools. What was, at first, a pool of meaningless shapes and dull colors begins to teem with life. Purple sea stars, green urchins, orange anemones, red hermit crabs, blue mussels, white barnacles, transparent sea vases; once we’ve seen them, we can’t believe we didn’t see them earlier.

We forget our fatigue, our cold, wet feet, and we begin to discover our kinship with a world we have never seen before. We overcome the strangeness of the place and begin to lift rocks and reach under overhangs. With luck, we snag a young lobster or an old Jonah crab, and, gingerly, we learn to hold them so that they are calm and safe. We return them to their holes or crevices. One student finds a colony of large anemones in a tiny cave, and group after group of students approaches to admire it and snap photos. The students name the cave after the one who found it.

It seems to me that this is a lot like education: we leave our homes to go to a strange place and we’re thrown together with others our own age and a couple of adults called teachers. The world makes demands on us—chores, schedules, rhythms, work. At first, at least metaphorically, we’re cold and wet, we’re not sure why we’re here, and we’re not sure what we’re looking at. But, with time and guidance, we begin to see for ourselves and then to discover. A teacher can show us where to stand, how to look, encourage patience, demonstrate how to turn a rock over without destroying what’s beneath it. But we have to use our own eyes, our own hands, and our own minds to make sense of our experience. And then we can begin to explore on our own.

This process, which occurs in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, is transformational and transcendental. No student who has spent an hour in the tide pools will look at this part of the world the same way again; and, by extension, we hope, will learn that other apparently inaccessible, cold, wet, seemingly empty spaces are worth the trouble to get to know.

Is the Bible a Banned Book?

What do you need in order to look at Medieval art, to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, speeches—or Abraham Lincoln’s speeches—or to read Moby-Dick?

Regardless of your personal beliefs, your faith, or your lack of faith, you need a knowledge of the Bible.

So, in our high school, we teach a course for 10th graders called “The Bible as Literature.” Not that this matters, but, to give some perspective, the woman who teaches it happens to be a Jew who tutors local students in Hebrew for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. (She has also taught an elective course in Hebrew for our students, and she teaches another seminar on World Religions.)

Each spring, as a private school, we submit a list of the books we’ll be using the following year to local districts in New York State. The districts buy these books using the money of taxpayers—the parents of our students—and send the books to us. We use them and return them at the end of the year. Our students come from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, but only New York has such a law or program. Students from Massachusetts and Connecticut private schools buy their own textbooks.

Maybe you can see where this is heading. We submit a list of dozens of books that includes, say, The Great Gatsby, Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, The Color Purple, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Algebra 2, and… the Bible.

And, a few days later, a nice person from the local district calls to say that they can’t order the Bible. It’s not her job to say why or why not a book may be ordered—the computer just won’t let her do it. Software for separation of church and state.

So, presumably, the way we’re asked to teach is this: “See that man wrapped up like a mummy in that painting by Giotto? Does anyone know who he is? Well, let me tell you about Lazarus… He’s a guy whose story is told in the Bible.” “Does anyone know to whom Lincoln is referring when he speaks of the ‘better angels’ of our nature? No? Well, let me tell you about Paul… He’s a guy who wrote letters that you can find in the Bible…” And on and on and on. Good humanities teachers—literature, history, philosophy, you name it—will necessarily reveal to their students that the world in which they live is full of allusions to a book that the district is not allowed to purchase for them.

Let’s hope against hope that they’re iconoclastic enough to look into it for themselves.

Our students buy their own Bibles.