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THE WALDORF SCHOOL MOVEMENT

Waldorf education dates back to September 1919, when the first Waldorf School was founded by Rudolf Steiner himself. This took place in Stuttgart in Southern Germany at the request of the then director of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette company in that city. The school was intended in the first place for the children of the factory employees, thus arising directly out of modern industrial life. The school grew in leaps and bounds to the size of a thousand children, drawing its pupils from many parts of Germany, from other countries in Europe and even from as far away as America. In the years that followed ten other schools were founded in Germany. Hitler declared that the philosophy in these schools with its emphasis on nurturing individuality ran contrary to that of National Socialism, and therefore they must close. During the war years therefore, this left some half a dozen small struggling schools in Switzerland, England and North America. There was little or no communication between them and the outlook was extremely bleak.

Immediately after the war ended, the schools began to revive, to grow and multiply almost too quickly for there to be sufficient teachers trained in Waldorf methods. There are schools today throughout the world. The spread of schools has come about through no kind of central plan or directive. On the contrary, each school is an entirely independent enterprise, resting wholly on the initiatives of teachers and parents and whatever local support they may find. It is in this way alone that a worldwide Waldorf movement has come about, purely on the merits of the work itself and what it offers. Every such school entails great commitment on the part of teachers, parents and friends. Nevertheless the work continues to grow, more easily in countries such as Denmark, Germany, Norway and, to some extent, Holland and Finland in Europe, and also Australia and New Zealand, where the governments do in a measure subsidize private education. This, unhappily, is not the case in Britain, Canada, the United States and elsewhere.¹ Yet there are still numerous schools in these countries, with more opening all the time.

Rudolf Steiner gave the first suggestions for education as far back as 1907, but an actual request for a school did not come until human conscience had been stirred to the uttermost by the fearful calamity of the First World War. This left all thinking people stunned, with a sense of moral and social failure and the collapse of all the alluring hopes people had been nursing for a forthcoming era of assured peace, industrial progress and economic security on an ever-widening scale. The phase that followed that war period was one of dictatorships which, in turn, led directly into the Second World War.

Today we are floundering in a morass of doubts and uncertainties with new horrors in the headlines every day. All this gives evidence of a fact that few can fail to recognize: that we find ourselves entangled in the decaying elements of an old world order with its traditional faiths and authorities, and that the world awaits the birth of a new faith, a new vision, and a new conscience, a new awakening to the reality of man as a spiritual being. How can we rediscover ourselves and, in so doing, find that despite all the frantic contradictions of the times, the sustaining forces of all existence are still the realities of truth, beauty, goodness which find their fulfilment in love? It is out of renewed knowledge of the human being, a knowledge imbued with wisdom, (Anthropos-Sophia) that Waldorf education has been born.

Waldorf education directs itself to the growing forces of the child, to the ground of human morality perceived in the healthy life of play of the infant years, to the ground of social being expressed in the healthy life of feeling in the childhood years, to the ground of mutual understanding based on a healthy enhancement of thinking in the adolescent years, so that the young adult, when he comes to himself, may find himself at home in the world. Since these are actual needs and not inventions, more and more people are learning to recognize in Waldorf education a means to enable children, through the right engaging of their faculties in the ordered sequence of the years, to grow into a generation of men and women with more likely answers to the world situation than people have today. The future must lie in the maturing forces of childhood which carry within themselves the mystery of human evolution. The task of education is to nurture these forces so that they may find their truest possible expression in the years to come, in individual and in public life.