Steiner Waldorf Pedagogy in Schools

A Critical Introduction

Martyn Rawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000390865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación primaria

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of Steiner or Waldorf pedagogy and practice in schools. Drawing on key research, it traces the origins of Steiner education from the original Waldorf school and shows how this approach has since been adapted and applied in educational settings around the world.

Outlining the educational philosophy of Steiner education, the book considers its unique features, such as its commitment to a pedagogical anthropology that takes the whole developing human being into account – body, mind and spirit – and the developmental approach that arises out of this. It sets out the specific curriculum and teaching approach alongside vignettes of teaching and learning situations adopted in Steiner educational settings to show how the approach works in practice. Offering a critical perspective on this teaching style, Rawson examines the contributions that Steiner education has made in different cultures and looks towards future developments in China and other Asian countries.

Considering all aspects of Steiner education, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the fundamental elements of this approach and its continuing relevance within the educational landscape.

Part 1
Rudolf Steiner and the origins of his educational ideas

Summary: In this section I introduce Rudolf Steiner, who created Waldorf education. Following a brief account of his life, I explain his early epistemological and philosophical works because these provided a foundation for his subsequent projects, including the development of an educational approach. Returning to his biography, I outline some of Steiner’s experiences that influenced his educational ideas and then summarize his first published work on education.

Rudolf Steiner: “Stranger in a strange land”

“I stand alone here. There is no one who has the slightest understandings of the things that move and inspire me.” (from a letter to Rosa Mayreder in 1890) “Whether people around me understand me or not – I follow my own star,”

(from a letter to the Specht family from the same year, both cited in Selg, 2014)

It is always a challenge to understand our proximity to and distance from people who lived in other times and places. It is hard to judge how much they were a product of their times and how much their unique individuality shines through. We have to decide how much we can identify with and what remains out of reach, strange, foreign and other. This difficulty applies to all historical figures, and especially to famous people because we know what became of them and because our understanding is coloured by received opinion and the critical reception of their work. Understanding Rudolf Steiner is particularly challenging because recognition of his achievements by the wider cultural world has been grudging. This is partly because of the remarkable range of his works, partly because they still do not fit into conventional categories and, not least, because of the hermetic nature of the movement that grew up among his followers.

To the first generations of his followers, Steiner was the great sage of our times and his works were an endless source of wisdom, like an inexhaustible wellspring of important ideas in many different fields. Others, both during his lifetime and up until today, have ignored, dismissed or discredited these works, mainly because of their ‘occult’ background and because they (still) do not fit into the current paradigms of science, philosophy, politics, education or the arts. The term occult has a dubious reputation, but it actually simply refers to knowledge that we cannot base on what our normal senses mediate. However, it was exactly this aspect that attracted (and still attracts) a lot of capable people to Steiner’s ideas. These were and are on the whole modern, educated and critical people, dissatisfied with materialistic answers to the challenges of modernity and who want a modern spirituality that does not look back to romanticism or mysticism, and who also want to use these insights to change the current world.

It took a while before Steiner’s message got through, and for much of his career he was respected but treated as an outsider. Once his message started to be understood, and he had understood how best to formulate it, people joined his cause. At this point he started attracting opposition, some of it dangerous, not least among the emergent National Socialist movement. Any informed study of his life must conclude, with Peter Selg (2014), that Steiner was entirely motivated not by personal ambition but by the will to do something useful to ameliorate the evils of his times and those he anticipated. He was modest but determined. He arrived at his insights not through illumination or grace or because he was born into them, but through hard and often lonely work.

As the 20th century descended into totalitarianism, global war, racial genocide, materialism at all levels of society and the ongoing victories of capitalism over socialism, a worldwide, growing ecological disaster, the rise of new global hegemonies and the slow or rapid fall of older ones, it did not seem very likely that Steiner’s work would bear fruit and usher in a new era of peace, spiritual enlightenment and social harmony. However, perhaps like Zhou Enlai’s apocryphal comment on the success of the French Revolution, it really is too early to judge how fruitful Steiner’s ideas have been. Really good ideas do last. Some of Aristotle’s ideas – such as the value of practical wisdom or phronesis – or Laozi’s ideas of attunement and flow, are still relevant today, and the comparison is not exaggerated. It is certainly too early to pass judgement on the relevance of Steiner’s ideas, though as this book hopes to show, in education they do seem highly relevant.

Biography and biographical mythos

Today we have the benefit of a number of well-researched biographies of Steiner and historical accounts of some of his work (in English, Childs, 2003; Lachman, 2007; Gidley, 2011; MacDermott, 2009; Lindenberg, 2013; Selg, 2014 and an interesting series of biographical essays at www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Rudolf_Steiner_Biography.php). It is, I believe, now possible to begin to appreciate Rudolf Steiner as a person with a human biography. Today, there are critical editions of his works, and more and more people are taking a new look at his ideas in practice. In what follows, I briefly outline Steiner’s biography in as much as it sheds light on his educational ideas. These undoubtedly grew out of his life and works and can only really be fully appreciated in this context. Jan Göschel (2012) has developed the notion of biographical mythos (drawing on Aristotle’s notion of mythos as plot or storyline in drama and Ricoeur’s revival of this term for the meaning-making narrative structure of a life-story) to describe the constructed interpretation of the underlying narrative of a person’s life. In this sense I construct a biographical narrative of Steiner’s life with from the specific perspective of his educational ideas.

Steiner was born in 1861 in Donje (Lower) Kraljevec, which today is in Croatia and at that time was on the Hungarian side of the Austrian–Hungarian border. Peo ple there spoke Croatian. His Catholic baptism certificate is in Croatian and Latin. In 1924, Steiner could apparently still read Hungarian, which was spoken at his secondary school, though his mother tongue was German. Hemleben (1963) describes the region that Steiner grew up in, the Burgenland, as lying at the boundary between Middle and Eastern Europe, not just politically but also culturally. Steiner’s parents had needed to move from their beloved homeland in the forests of the Waldviertel north of the Danube in Lower Austria, a place of great natural beauty that had been barely changed by modernity, and to which they returned at the end of their lives. His father had originally been a gamekeeper to the local nobility but had to find a new profession, as he was not allowed to get married. He became a poorly paid telegrapher and later stationmaster. We are told by Hemleben (1963) that he came from “hardy mountain peasant stock”, an evocative phrase one might not find in a modern biography. As Hemleben (1963) points out, the boy grew up within the polarity of the healing power of nature and the world of technology with its attractive power, though Steiner declared that he experienced nature as the stronger force (Steiner, 1928, p. 3). Steiner evidently possessed clairvoyant abilities and could experience spiritual aspects in nature and in people. He could apparently move beyond the barriers of the sense world at will. Even as a child, he realized that though such experiences were real for him, others clearly did not experience them, and there was no cultural context for them in his social environment.

The family moved several times to different railway stations, each move bringing him nearer to Vienna. Steiner himself emphasized in his autobiography (1928, p. 2) that he didn’t feel he belonged to the place he was born in, nor to the places in which he grew up, which may have enhanced his experience of being an outsider. This multicultural background and his later experiences in cosmopolitan Vienna sensitized him to the problems that would arise when the new, emergent nationalism was linked to ethnic or cultural identity, a problem that is still unresolved today. Quite early on he saw the need for a cultural identity that was broader and more universal than ethnic or national identifications. In his major philosophical work The Philosophy of Freedom (1963a, though originally published in 1894), he argued that people should be judged as individuals irrespective of their origins or cultural affiliations, social status or gender.

Lindenberg (1992) opens his earlier biography of Steiner with the sentence “Rudolf Steiner was the child of poor people”. From a humble background, he worked his way up the social mountain to become an internationally renowned figure. When Steiner died in 1925, his obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 401). Thousands of people from all over Europe attended his funeral. He was certainly one of very few people (if any) from his background to gain a doctorate in philosophy (in 1891 at the University of Rostock). He was clearly precocious, reading Kant at 15 years of age and excelling at secondary school, and later at the Technical University in Vienna.

Steiner makes specific reference to his discovery that, though he loved the material world around him, “the reality of the spiritual world was to me as certain as that of the physical” (1928, p. 11). Born into a Catholic family, he naturally attended mass, but it was the ritual of the liturgy rather than the doctrine or the sermons that made the deepest impression. However, it was his discovery of the laws of geometry that provided him with a key to understanding his spiritual experiences. He wrote,

I said to myself ‘the objects and occurrences which the senses perceive are in space. But, just as this space is outside of man (sic), so there exists also within man a sort of soul-space which is the arena of spiritual realities and occurrences’. In my thoughts I could not see anything in the nature of mental images such as man forms within him of actual things, but I saw a spiritual world in this soul-arena. Geometry seemed to me to be a knowledge which man had appeared to have produced but which had, nevertheless, a significance quite independent of man.

(Steiner, 1928, p. 11)

This discovery laid the basis for his later theory of knowledge. Steiner’s question was not, “Is there a spiritual dimension to life?” but instead “How do the physical and spiritual dimensions relate to each other?” (Hemleben, 1963, p. 23). He kept such experiences to himself, and it is remarkable that he was clearly able to do this in a healthy way at such a young age. Only at the age of 18 did he meet someone with whom he could share his experiences – a herb-gatherer, Felix Koguzski, whom he met on the train to Vienna and who sold herbs to apothecaries in the city. He became friends with this man and his family. This outwardly simple herb-gatherer was clearly an initiate with profound spiritual insight that he had developed on his own, though he was versed in esoteric literature (Selg, 2009). Steiner describes how he first had to learn to understand the man’s spiritual dialect:

According to the usual conception of “learning”, one might say that it would be impossible to ‘learn’ anything from this man. But, if one possessed in oneself a perception of the spiritual world, one might obtain glimpses very deep into this world through another who had a firm footing there.

(Steiner, 1928, p. 40)

This was a crucial encounter for Steiner’s development because it led to him meeting an unknown Master, who initiated him (Steiner, 1966). As Childs (2003, p. 11) notes, Steiner did not mention his experiences of the spiritual world to anyone for some 34 years, with the exception of Koguzski, but he dedicated himself to finding a scientific approach to spiritual knowledge, as he was convinced that this was necessary in modern times.

This experience helped Steiner to formulate a theory of knowledge that the philosophy of his day did not provide, as it was assumed that human knowledge is limited to what the senses provide and what logic can deduce. After painstakingly working his way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the age of 16, he realized that he would have to build a philosophical bridge between the world of the senses and the spiritual world that Kant ruled out, as being beyond the boundaries of the human mind. Childs’ (2003) chapter title on this phase of Steiner’s life is apt – ‘Researching in two worlds’ – for this is what Steiner did during his scientific studies at university and later during his career as a private tutor, scholar, researcher, journalist, publicist, adult educator, artist and public lecturer.

Lindenberg (2013) entitles the opening chapter of his Steiner biography (in Jon McAlice’s translation) ‘Stranger’ and opens with the sentence “Born a stranger in a strange land.” This gives expression not only to the circumstances of his birth, but to the more subtle fact that Steiner, with his special gifts and spiritual insights, was mostly not recognized as such, especially growing up in such a humble background, though this experience followed him during most of his life. He even appears to us from this historical perspective as an outsider, an enigma, an exceptional person in the many social contexts he ended up in.

Steiner himself played down his personal life in his autobiography, stating that it was of no concern of the reader, and until recently his followers have treated this side of his life with discretion verging on hagiographic reverence. We know that he was married twice and had no children and that his first wife, Anna Eunike-Steiner, was a widow with five children with whom he maintained contact over many years. His second wife, Marie von Sivers, who was of German-Russian origin, was trained in recitation and drama and was heavily involved in esotericism. The first marriage faded as his career became more successful, his life became more peripatetic and his relationship to Marie von Sivers grew, but Steiner waited until Anna died in 1911, and then three years later married Marie von Sivers. He kept in contact with the family members and visited them when he could. It is assumed that both marriages had an element of social propriety, though both relationships were evidently personally very important to Steiner.

The didactic aim of Steiner’s autobiography, The Story of My Life (1928, first edition in English), which was partly dictated from his sickbed at the end of his life, was to explain his spiritual path and how his Anthroposophy developed, rather than be an autobiography in a personal sense. Steiner’s autobiography is to a large extent an account, from his perspective, of his relationships to people and how these influenced him, in particular how ideas merged and separated and what effect this had on him and on the world both were embedded in. This is a profoundly relational view of the world and people’s actions and understandings within it.

My sense is that Steiner’s biographical mythos involved significant encounters with people, through which he learned to translate and apply his inner experiences into actions in the world. A few examples (from the many mentioned in his biography) include the herb-gatherer Felix Koguzski; the poet and feminist Rosa Mayreder, with whom he was close whilst writing The Philosophy of Freedom; Margaret McMillan and her commitment to poor children and nurturing their imagination; o...