INTRODUCTION

What are the distinguishing features of Waldorf education? This cannot be answered, as some might expect, in a nutshell. If one were to attempt to do so, one would have to say it embraces a new view of the whole of life, in particular of the human being in his threefold nature of body, soul and spirit and, therefore, also of the successive phases of childhood leading on to adulthood. That is saying a great deal, and yet might not mean a great deal to a parent seeking answers.

Michael Hall is now over sixty years old. About fifty years ago, when still a young school in Streatham, London, known as the New School, the teachers wondered what impression their work would make on a formal educator. Therefore, they invited a friendly inspection by the Ministry of Education. This led to a visit by several inspectors for several days. In the summing up, the leading inspector, speaking on behalf of himself and his colleagues present, said they were much impressed with what they had seen of the children, their easy yet respectful manner and the quality of their work. Then he added, ‘We have seen every type of school in this country, state schools, (British) public schools, progressive schools, various private and denominational schools—the ethics may have been different but the education was essentially the same in all of them. In regard to curriculum questions for this or that aged child, we knew exactly where we were. This is the first school we have encountered in which the philosophy of the school has so far altered the customary curriculum and treatment of subjects that, to find our way, we had each time to ask again.’ They did not seem perturbed by this but only interested. At the end they recommended the teachers to wait a while longer until the upper school was better established before applying for formal recognition. It was clear from their manner that they anticipated no particular difficulty.

It was a full twenty years later, after World War II, when Michael Hall, no longer the New School, was newly established in its home in Sussex, that the teachers thought they would again ask for an inspection before they were to be formally inspected by law—a requirement rescinded some years later. The encounter of inspectors and teachers was again one of growing cordiality. The ‘recording inspector’ paid a preliminary visit to feel the lie of the land, having never before visited a Waldorf school. He was a mature and far-seeing man, much experienced, serious, yet of great geniality. In a conversation during that first visit he expressed the view that what would matter most in the coming inspection would not be to examine in detail what this school did compared with others, but much more to recognize what lived centrally in the school giving it its character and permeating every aspect of it to make a unity of the whole. He could not state in words just what this was, but he had seen it and he could only hope his colleagues, when they arrived, would see it too— which most remarkably they did. It can only be described, in retrospect, as a model meeting. It was not that they were lacking in criticisms, or in offering suggestions, yet these came secondary to the overall picture they had arrived at together. Their visit resulted in a unanimous recommendation to the Ministry of Education for recognition of the school both as an efficient primary school and as a secondary school competent to prepare its students for university entrance. Indeed, they had studied the records of former students at college and later in their vocations and found these satisfactory. They were amazed that scientific notebooks could be made so beautiful and asked to take some away with them. The printed ministry report re-echoed all this in very positive terms. The recording inspector said privately at the end: ‘You have set up the conditions you need for carrying out your own work, but you are also preparing what should eventually flow into the whole of public education.’

Our challenging times

It was not the object of either group of inspectors to delve into the philosophy underlying Waldorf education. They judged by what they saw and this led them to conclude it was a good school, it did good to the children.

With enquiring parents, for whom this book is primarily written, the matter is different. They are about to commit their children to a school about which they may know little or nothing. There are parents who take the school at its face value and, having placed their child, are content to wait and see how things work out. If their child is happy, there is little more they need do about it. Their problem arises when they have to explain to their relatives, friends or neighbours why they chose that unusual school. They may find themselves hard put to it to explain, but they get by it somehow. The others may not be too impressed by their halting, semi-articulate answers—but, who knows, perhaps they too will see it one day!

There are other parents who feel they must understand more before they can come to a responsible decision. They want to know something of the underlying principles, or better, the moral and spiritual grounds on which Steiner education is based.

We hope this little book will help the first type of parents to find the words they need, and that it will provide the second type of parent with the stimulus to pursue the study further, and, in course of time, to be able in turn to help other new parents. Then it will not all be left to the teachers.

To begin with we need to see clearly the conditions of our time into which children are born, and then to see how this education sets out to meet them. We need to step back and take an impartial look.

We are obliged to recognize that we live in a highly intellectual age, one given over much more to theory than to genuine insight. Such theories and the practices arising from them invade the lives of the young when they are most receptive and least defensive: the younger the child, the deeper the effects.

Our modern, theoretical knowledge does not, in fact, grasp or explain the true being of man. Beneath all that the average human being knows of himself, there live hopes, longings, aspirations, dreams of the might-have-been or the might-yet-be, unused gifts, maybe, that are urging to be realized—all these play into conscious life from inner depths, shaping what we meet as disposition of character. They are real forces welling up from within; left unresolved they lead to the sense of frustration so often to be met both in private and in public life. There are great discontents in the world at different levels, and they make for a sick age.

Witness how in this one century, not yet ended, we have had to face two global wars and all the resultant ills with which we are still contending. See the lapse into dictatorships, great and small; the drift even in the so-called democracies towards centralist controls, to the detriment of free initiatives; the unending conflicts and lesser wars on so many fronts; the ever-present menace of escalation towards unthinkable nuclear disaster. Observe the seething racial and political unrest; the disruption of countless homes, and resulting instability in the victimized young; the increased callousness of crime, including the extremes of juvenile delinquency. Everywhere we live in insecurity in the present and anxiety for the future. Even the brilliant advances in technology accentuate new dangers and bitter rivalries—each new discovery demands an immediate counter-discovery to hold it in check. The younger generations feel trapped in a world which belies all natural idealism—and to cap it all there is the spectral menace of unemployment, paralysing the healthy impulse to be at work and leading to violence born of despair.

Facing all this, we turn our gaze to the tender, new-born infants, in all their innocent dependency on whoever and whatever is to greet them as they enter this world. They have hardly begun to use their eyes and ears when they are subjected to the deadening effects of the unreal sights and sounds of the public media; and before they have begun properly to articulate they are given computer toys to deaden the very beginnings of their original thinking faculties. All these conditions have become a fact of life and we can neither avoid nor annul them. Facing all this we can agree with Hamlet that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’.

But where shall we find the villain of the piece—where but in the mind of man himself? There are two psychological demons at work. The one goads man on with extravagant visions of ever vaster accomplishments until he begins to conceive of himself as a kind of god—that is the tempter called, of old, Lucifer. The other entangles man more and more in matter, convincing him that, in fact, he is no more than the dust he is made of—that is the ancient deceiver, the father of lies, Mephistopheles, or Ahriman. He would convince us with Macbeth in his final defeat that life is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

These are the hidden monsters, externalized in public life. How are they to be met and overcome, for the sake of children growing up? How, for their sake, can we build their faith in a world laden with mistrust, their hope where there is so much despair, their charity of heart where there is so much enmity and hate? Are we exaggerating or describing facts? Here are the true tasks before the educator. We may not diminish the enormity of the tasks; we have to grow to meet them.

Once we have recognized the inadequacy of our modern, everyday thinking to grasp the realities of life, above all where they concern the human being most inwardly, how thin and barren it is and lacking in feeling, how shallow in moral content, we may turn with alarm to see what we are really doing to our children. We can see how powerfully and unrelentingly our mechanized and soulless environment works upon them, and how an education which works for superficial results and builds on futile memorizing vitiates more than it aids the hidden potentials of childhood. It is not to be wondered at that we meet with so many negatives in the young: precocious judgement, lack of trust and belief, rejection of authority, mental and moral maladjustment, absenteeism from school, and frequent cases of delinquency and vandalism. These can be seen as protests against life as it is. ‘The soul,’ says Rudolf Steiner, ‘needs nourishment as well as the body.’ But what if teachers fail to distinguish stones from bread? That may seem a very harsh statement but the negative facts are universally known and need to be accounted for. An education which fails to feed the deeper forces of childhood represents not only the absence of a good but becomes a source of ill. It undermines rather than builds up hope and promise for a better future. Cleverly conceived programmes we have in plenty. The intentions are good, but the generations of human beings do not grow stronger, and the world situation does not improve.

Some guiding thoughts

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is a phenomenon of our time. Himself trained in mathematics and science, and at the same time having also acquired a wide survey of the humanities and the arts, his main endeavour was to counter the narrow deterministic conceptions which dominate so much of modern outlook and research. He saw and addressed himself to the latent possibilities in man of advancing beyond the present-day accepted limits of cognition to awaken, through self-discipline and exercise, to a knowledge of the spiritual worlds underlying outer existence. That means that man himself properly belongs to those higher worlds. When man applies his will to an outer object, say a spade, he brings about an objective change in regard to the soil. This is a first step towards a productive garden or field. Similarly, if he learns systematically to apply his will to his own thinking as the instrument for knowledge, his thinking eventually undergoes a transformation; he no longer sees himself as the plaything of outer world processes, but his thinking becomes invigorated so that it can penetrate directly to the creative forces at work in the world—it becomes a God-thinking, a creative force itself. Through such thinking man may hope to become the active initiator of his own future instead of drifting, as he mostly does today, upon the tide of events. Rudolf Steiner‘s method of work calls upon man, in the highest degree, to face and outgrow himself. Then only can he hope to grow beyond the limiting circumstances which hem him in and press down so strongly upon the children.

Rudolf Steiner, by the methods he describes, was able to arrive at quite special powers of insight into human nature. Out of this insight he could then evolve a form of education addressed to the full measure of a human being in his thought, feeling and will. We, too, with his help, may arrive at a totally new conception of man—we may learn to see him as a being of body, soul and spirit, and so bring into practice an education which attends to all three, a knowledge which gives the teacher quite new possibilities of helping children towards a healthy, harmonious and fruitful development of their faculties.

For one thing, we are led to a quite new appreciation of what we mean by individuality. The single human being not only fulfils a general law of nature—which might be said of any species of animal—but is seen to be a particular and irreplaceable expression of the divinely creative forces which have brought him into existence. Heredity and environment produce the necessary physical conditions, as is the case with the animal, but it is our own spirit alone which can determine the course our life is to take. This is already present from birth and gradually lights up in consciousness, beginning with the first utterance of the word ‘I’. Childhood thus acquires a quite new significance when we can view it as an incarnating process which partly conforms to the laws of physical nature but partly also transcends these in accordance with higher laws. We begin to see that the true nature of man lives in his non-nature, in what enables him by degrees to raise himself above nature, to transform himself and the world around him. That is the being we serve as educator, but for that we must know something of the laws that rule in childhood, its state of dependency on the way to the independent, self-determining life of the adult. The richer the force of this hidden individuality in the child, the more abounding in quality is the life that ensues.

Who can account by ordinary methods for a Michaelangelo, a Shakespeare or a Beethoven? Yet they were all three little children once and had to discover their faculties in the course of growing up. So it is in some degree in every human being. Every child is on a similar voyage of discovery and self-discovery and we, as adults, can help or hinder. Childhood is an awakening as well as a growing-up process; it leads from the ‘sleep of infancy’ to the ‘dream of childhood’, to the ‘lighting-up of adolescence’, to the ‘responsible thinking of the adult’. The spirit we serve as parents and teachers reveals itself in a physical-material body, but it cannot be explained by the laws of physics or matter. How modern human beings can arrive at a working knowledge of the spirit in terms compatible with a scientific outlook is described by Rudolf Steiner in his teaching of anthroposophy or modern spiritual science; this illuminates the facts of physical-material science from a higher source. This higher source dwells in the human being himself; he has only to reach it.

Childhood is the shaping of the instrument for the life of the adult. In the course of childhood there are revealed, stage by stage, capacities, predispositions, also weaknesses and obstructions. By entering into these with understanding, we may, as educators, help greatly in the process leading to conscious and responsible adulthood. Just as a gardener can help his plants by bettering the conditions in which they grow, so may a teacher, by removing unfavourable influences and promoting conditions harmonious to child nature, help the individuality in each growing child to come to better fruition. Such an intervention is the opposite of any attempt to mould the individual to a given pattern, but the aim is to do everything possible, out of an objective study of nature and human nature, to help each individual to become more truly himself or herself.

The object of Rudolf Steiner education is to aid children so that as men and women they may bring their powers, their own innate and sacred human qualities, to greater fulfilment. It is an education which serves the freedom of the human spirit. It has been given freely to the world. It is in the world. The distinguishing feature of a Waldorf school lies in the endeavour to practise it.