9
TO PARENTS

Parents will have their own reasons for choosing to send their children to a private school. No doubt they will have made careful enquiry into the character of the school and the particular benefits it offers. That this should be the case in connection with Waldorf Schools is highly desirable, for the life of these schools depends to a great degree on close understanding and cooperation between parents and teachers. It needs to be understood that what is offered in these schools is not the product of just another educational theory but is based on a total view of life that encompasses religion, art, science, history, reaching into the very heart of what we might come to see as the real foundation of knowledge and life on earth. Rudolf Steiner himself said that the Waldorf Schools would grow because they were seen to be good schools, that is, schools that do good to children. That was the basis on which Michael Hall received official recognition. The inspectors did not feel they needed to enter into the philosophy of the school—they judged by what they saw to be its fruits, and to a large extent that is the case with many of the parents. Yet there are always some who want to pursue things further. The question has been asked, for example, whether, since all the teachers serve a common ideal, there might not be some danger of indoctrination.

Once we have come to acknowledge the fact that education down to the most elementary levels is dominated by tenets of materialistic science, we may also readily see that we are already indoctrinated from the start by a one-sided view of the human being and the world; moreover one that undermines human values and is leading to wholesale havoc in public and in private life. The very triumphs of our advancing technology have multiplied disaster and have overwhelmed humanity with threats and anxieties on a fearsome scale. Waldorf teachers take full account of the positive achievements of our time, but they also perceive the moral as well as the material dangers that are invading life. They strive to develop a view both of nature and of human nature which includes the moral with the physical, correcting the one-sidedness of materialism. Then, instead of being mere onlookers at a world which, as is supposed, could go on just as well without us, we become an integral part of the whole of creation, bringing new meaning to all that comes to meet us. It becomes natural, as Rudolf Steiner proposed, that the human being should hold a central place in every subject taught. What the school is doing, far from indoctrinating, is to provide a corrective to the severe indoctrination which is already taking place, influencing every moment of our lives, and determining the future in which our children must play their part. It is a blessed thing for children if parents and children can enter into a mutual understanding of this.

Let us carry this somewhat further. The world is presented as being ruled by number. The eighteenth century view that mathematics is the key to the universe still largely prevails. Let us take the simple example of a piano. The construction is most certainly ruled by number, but in so far as the piano is an instrument for music, the numbers are subject to the indefinable laws and realities of the art of music. A skilled musician is needed to reveal what the piano is actually meant to be. Slowly, very slowly as yet, such a view is beginning to dawn in relation to the whole of creation. Number is there, and structure is there in mineral, plant, animal, man, in physics, chemistry and all the sciences, number in the proportions to be met in art as well as nature, number in all the rhythms that permeate all nature, above all, living nature— number is there not as the cause but as the revealed consequence of what rules in creation. Our science has arrived at a quantitative view of the world in which quality, beauty in nature and human morality become uneasy presences. The world is viewed as a machine and the human being as an inconsequent cipher. Clearly if this view is to persist, it can only bring ruin in its wake. We have to find a way, a scientific way, of arriving at the perception of the world as a meaningful work of art, and of man as the bearer of a new evolving morality, in his unceasing striving for truth, beauty, wisdom, love.

In this endeavour, born of the life-long work of Rudolf Steiner, a Waldorf School, if rightly understood, stands in the forefront of genuine progress towards a saner future. The work is bound to prosper to the extent that parents, out of their own life experience, come to see the truth of this. Then any fear of indoctrination must simply fall away, and the work be seen as one that is intended to help free human faculties from their present bondage to a materialistic world view.

Our older children are not aware of the fact that in many respects they are being taught differently from children elsewhere. On one occasion a group of sixteen-year-olds, who had been brought up mainly in a Waldorf School, approached a teacher with the following direct questions.

‘We would like to know what you have been teaching us. For example, you have often spoken to us of the threefold human being. We would like to know whether what you have been teaching us is what you think, or what Dr Steiner thinks, or what the world thinks.’ The teacher answered somewhat as follows: ‘What I have taught you is what I think, but in arriving at the thoughts I have shared with you I was very much helped by the thoughts of Rudolf Steiner. It is not the way the world in general thinks today. But of this I can fully assure you: you will have no difficulty in understanding what you will be taught at college of the way the world thinks, but you may recall that there is another possible approach to the same phenomena.

‘Now who will be in a better position to form a free judgement, he who has met only the one dominant view, as expressed in textbooks, or someone who will be in a position to compare this with at least one other point of view?’

There was a pause, and then one of the young company, a choleric, thumped his chest and said, ‘Mr X. I declare myself thoroughly satisfied.’

Many years later most of that group met the same teacher again. This same student, now well established in his profession, asked: ‘Are you not disappointed, Mr X., that so few of us have followed your point of view?’

And Mr X. replied, ‘No, I am not disappointed. My object was not that you should follow my point of view, but that you should be better able to arrive at your own.’

Looking back over the years, the young people of the first interview, now entering middle age, could agree that far from being subjected to dogma or being indoctrinated, they had been prepared for a life of inner freedom in which they could find themselves and decide their own views.

One cannot be long acquainted with a Waldorf School without hearing of Rudolf Steiner and his teaching which he called anthroposophy. People find it a puzzling word. It actually combines two words, anthropos, man, as in anthropology, and sophia, wisdom, as in philosophy. In other words: wisdom about the human being. Man, we will admit, is still the greatest mystery we can meet on earth, and wisdom we know to be something other than knowledge. A wise person is one who has insight, one who can see life from within. A fuller interpretation of the word anthroposophy might be spiritual insight into the world as revealed through the nature of the human being. An American professor once wrote: ‘In these days of exploration of outer space is it not necessary that we also begin an exploration of inner space?’ That is precisely what anthroposophy sets out to do, but whereas from outer space we make use of many outer instruments, for inner space we ourselves must become the instrument, that is, we have to develop further the faculties with which we are already endowed, that is, our thinking, feeling and willing. There are words in common usage which point in the direction of such a development. We say of someone that he has a powerful imagination; of another that he is greatly inspired; of a third that he is profound in his intuitions. All three words, Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, carry the mind beyond the everyday. Anthroposophy offers disciplines enabling anyone who has the will to develop these faculties, possessed by all human beings in varying degree, into higher organs of perception. In the past we have lived very much by the gifts of the chosen few. Today, each one of us, as modern human beings, can strive in some measure to join their ranks, if only in the sense of taking full responsibility for our lives.

That is what the teacher meant who said to that group of children that he teaches as he thinks, not as he has been told to think, even though he admits his great indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner. The age of authority in the old sense has gone. It is because human beings do not sufficiently realize this and therefore fail to find the authority within themselves that the world is largely falling subject to all manner of external controls, so that one begins to wonder whether the age of human freedom will ever come. Our romantic poets thought the French revolution had opened the way to it with the cry, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, but they were sorely disappointed. They had to learn that freedom has to come from within and that it is inseparable from the power of love.

Thus Coleridge, still young, aged only twenty-five, could write:

 

... on that sea-cliff’s verge,
Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above,
Had made one murmur with the distant surge!
Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.

 

Do we teach anthroposophy? No, we do not, but we try to teach in such a way that children and young people can find their way towards the fullness of an experience such as that of Coleridge—that it may open ways, within the grasp of each one, to develop his inner life, and therefore also advance his outer life. Education can help achieve this. Parents can surely help achieve it too. The first years of a child’s life, before even kindergarten begins, are entirely in their hands. This responsibility goes right back to the moment of birth and even before. Surely every child that comes into this world must have an annunciation similar to that of the archangel Gabriel to Mary. The warm, welcoming thoughts of parents have a deep effect on the unborn child. And then so very much depends on the environment created, first the love that streams to the child, but an informed love that also knows how to attend to outer conditions; the right degree of light, of warmth, the right colours on the walls for the very young child; the right diet when the time comes (our doctors advise against meat in the early years); the right regularity of habits, waking to each day with a song and a prayer, and even more so when settling down to sleep; and the right toys, simple, colourful, not mechanical, not porcelain dolls that shut their eyes, and so on. These first years are the most deeply impressionable in the whole of life. The child, says Rudolf Steiner, is one great sense organ, absorbing every impression. Young parents need to study these things and, if need be, seek help and advice.

Then, when the child goes to the nursery or kindergarten, parents can again observe, consult, bring the home life into harmony with what the child receives at school. What shall the child best wear as the year goes round, especially in the winter to protect body warmth?

And then come the eight years with the class teacher—one great continuous adventure. It is above all important that parents should not merely accept what the school does and gives but they should know why reading is introduced later, feeling assured of the rightness of this—the why and the when and the how of everything done; the parents have a right to know, and the teachers will be happy to share, to consult and be consulted. Childhood is not merely a succession of years; each year is different and there are also crisis years, times of special change which need to be well understood.

And then come the upper school years. It is not only that the children enter the upper school having left their class teacher. Puberty brings problems, and adolescence demands a change of relationship with parents as well as with teachers and the adult world generally. These are real changes. The fact that some changes come earlier nowadays means there is a need for further study and understanding to be shared by parents and teachers, increasingly involving the children also. A Waldorf School provides a learning and growing situation not only for the children but for parents and teachers as well.

There are, of course, many ways in which parents can enter more closely into the social and cultural life of a Waldorf School, opportunities not only to study but to be introduced also to the arts, maybe to eurythmy, to painting, to music. Then there are festival occasions and exhibition times when parents can have a survey not only of their own children’s classes but of the whole school. There is usually a parent-teacher association. There is a great need for pioneer parents as well as pioneer teachers to carry the whole Waldorf movement further into the world, so that the benefits of this education may reach the greatest possible number of children. We need parents who can articulate to others what Steiner education is all about.

A lot of work for all, but we hope a joyous work!