How Much Steiner Is In My Waldorf?

The fourth in the education series tackles Waldorf education and its relationship to its founder.

Once, in a conversation about Waldorf schools on facebook, a friend of a friend described them as “cult-like.” I was shocked. She replied that she had attended a Waldorf school in Germany, and among other things, their family had to keep it a secret that they once in a while ate regular pasta, rather than whole grain. If the school found out, they would be in trouble! As I have researched Waldorf education in its many forms, this story stuck with me.

On Monday, we talked about the man, the legend, the racist, Rudolf Steiner. Rudy died in 1925, but his educational ideas have lived on in the form of Waldorf schools and Waldorf homeschooling. I have been struggling to write up my thoughts about how his ideas have been applied. If writing about Rudy himself was hard (because I knew it would upset people), writing about Waldorf is even harder. Most parents are trying to make the best choices for their children’s education, those choices often involve some compromise. It’s not my intention to say that choosing Waldorf is always bad!

After taking a look at some of Rudy’s problematic beliefs, the questions I keep coming back to are: How much Steiner is in your Waldorf? And how much of a problem is that? The answer to the first question, at least in terms of schools and ready-made homeschooling curriculums, is usually “considerably more than they tell you.” The answer to the second question is… I don’t fucking know? It varies! In trying to piece this apart, I am going to talk about Waldorf schools and Waldorf homeschooling together, even though there are obviously differences in application, because there is so much overlap.

Let's start with the goal of Waldorf. Some of the most adamantly anti-Waldorf people think that the goal is proselytization, to convert students to anthroposophy (Steiner’s philosophical and spiritual system for understanding the world). In the United States, I just haven’t seen any evidence of this. For the most part, no one is teaching anthroposophy directly, and Waldorf schools don’t seem to be turning out massive numbers of anthroposophists. If that is the goal, they are doing poorly! Rather, I would say that in most cases the goal of Waldorf education, whether at home or in a school, is to educate children as well as possible, but to do so according to and based on anthroposophical beliefs.

It’s tempting to believe that individual educators and curriculum makers probably disagree with Rudy on many things. After all, considering how much the man wrote and how much of it made no sense, it seems impossible to think that one human being could agree with all of it. If a teacher seems like a reasonable person, if the school or curriculum website makes sense and doesn’t glorify the nonsense, we assume it isn’t really at play. The example I often think of is reading. If they say “schools today push for reading younger and younger, and we think that’s a problem and want to give kids time to play and grow before they have to work on that!” that sounds different than “Rudolf Steiner taught that children shouldn’t learn their letters until they lose their milk teeth.”

The problem is that, with a few notable exceptions, most people aren’t leading with “the weird stuff.” There is a frustrating amount of opacity in what is going on in Waldorf, particularly in Waldorf schools. Some of this is baked right into the system. Remember that Rudy created the first school for the children of factory workers, not the children of anthroposophists. As a member of the Victorian era occult movement, it’s not surprising to find that Rudy was into secrecy. There are a lot of records of him telling his first teachers to reframe things for parents. For example, while he himself referred to the “verses” to be recited by children as “prayers”, he emphasized that teachers should never use the word “prayer” with students or parents, because it might upset them.

My own limited experience with Waldorf schools indicates that this attitude persists. The “Waldorf 101” talk given during the school tour gave a very sanitized version of the story, and when we brought up the issues with left-handedness during a teacher interview, my partner and I were told that the teacher had never heard anything like that and the school would never dream of trying to change a child’s dominant hand! “But,” she added hopefully, “your child is so young, you never know, she might still switch on her own!” When we replied that our child seemed completely left-handed, she grimaced.

Waldorf schools that are part of The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America also have some requirements, which you can read, including spiritual development for teachers, and basing all curriculums on an anthroposophical view of childhood development. For these reasons, when it comes to trained Waldorf teachers I tend to assume that they are fairly well versed in Rudy and his bullshit, and they agree with more of it than they say outright.

Homeschooling materials are different, for the simple reason that they are trying to coach the parent on how to do the teaching, which involves getting some buy in from the parent. That said, still the more intense shit tends to be “further back,” with the front sales pages emphasizing how natural and healthy it is for children. The exception to this is Christopherus Homeschooling Resources, which really leads with anthroposophical intensity. I’ve looked at most of the Waldorf and “Waldorf inspired” homeschool curriculums on the market, as well as many of the people offering coaching services or other support to “the Waldorf homeschooler.” I haven’t seen any of them openly criticize Rudolf Steiner on their websites. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assume they’re ok with most of it.

There are a number of potential pitfalls to children being educated according to anthroposophical ideas, even if they aren’t instructed in anthroposophy itself. To my mind, the most dangerous ones have to do with internal bias, especially racism. For instance, if a teacher believes that white people are “more spiritually evolved” than Black people, how does that bias impact how that teacher interacts with and teaches students of color? It’s worth noting that at least some Waldorf schools have done things specifically to counteract racism. Do they agree with most of what Rudy said but think he was wrong about race? It’s hard to say! What about biases towards left-handed students? And then there is the practice of understanding children according to their “temperament” (based on medieval humoral theory) and teaching children differently based on it, which Rudy absolutely told teachers to do. Given that the criteria Rudy used to determine a child’s temperament included physical appearance, could children be categorized based on something like “looking long” and then treated poorly? And in a Waldorf school that keeps the same teacher for children for a number of years, could a misunderstanding follow a kid for years? I am not saying this necessarily happens all the time, but the risk does worry me.

Maybe a homeschooling parent could use a Waldorf curriculum and avoid these pitfalls if they don’t hold those biases themselves, but there’s still the issue of potentially problematic or incomplete material. For instance, even the curriculum we started out with, which doesn’t adhere to the “official Waldorf schedule” of delaying formal study of letters and numbers until age seven or talk about temperament at all, is incredibly focused on European folklore, with not even an acknowledgement of other cultures until the first grade.

Speaking of that schedule, while Waldorf claims to be more child centered than other educational approaches, it still is far from child-led. I spent some time in a Facebook group for Waldorf parents (both the homeschooling and traditional schooling varieties) and teachers. A mom mentioned that her four year old son was asking a lot of questions about letters, what should she do? While the majority of parents advised her to satisfy his curiosity without pushing him too hard to master the alphabet, the teachers implored her to hold off. “Some kids seem advanced, but really they’re behind on play.” They seemed to believe that helping him learn the letters “early” would be detrimental to him in some way. A similar debate occurred when a homeschooler asked about skipping the Hebrew studies unit, taught in third grade. She was assured that if she simply understood the developmental point children were at in third grade, she would understand how important it was to teach these biblical stories, because they apparently resonate with kids that age in such a specific way that really nothing else in the universe will do the trick.

I have come across two Waldorf homeschooling advocates who offered free e-books on “rhythm” in homeschooling. The first was a short and sweet thing that was essentially just a guide to finding a daily and weekly schedule for one’s family, and I mostly liked it. The second one I looked at… was a rambling collection of essays that included everything from lectures about the importance of grinding your own grain (you can do it if you just put it in your rhythm!) to info about how often you should pray and have sex with your husband (the assumption is that you are a heterosexual mother, obviously), as well as a very long section about humoral temperament and lots of advice about how to trick your aforementioned husband into going along with Waldorf-ifying your life if he is against it (the trick is to be secretive, have sex with him even more, and make his favorite dinner). Back in the Facebook group, the writer of this book was celebrated as someone who was “easier on parents” than some of the other Waldorf homeschooling leaders out there. Phew!

And I’m not even touching on the Christian mysticism that makes so many people uncomfortable. And please, don’t get me started on eurythmy.

What does that mean for those of us who are attracted to some aspects of Waldorf? One reaction is that the level of bullshit is high enough, and Rudy himself is upsetting enough, that the whole thing is useless. If you feel that way, more power to you! If not, you’ll have to decide for yourself how much Waldorf you are comfortable with, and possibly how to mitigate any negative effects of the problematic source material. This is going to look different depending on your situation. I can’t tell you what to do, and I don’t really want to.

Personally, I think that Waldorf does “get it right” sometimes, but when it does it’s not because Rudy knew what he was talking about, it’s a coincidence or accident. Pushing four-year-olds to read can, in fact, have negative consequences! Open ended toys can be versatile and lovely! Getting outside is wonderful! But the things that are good about Waldorf are not just good about Waldorf, for the most part. Rudy does not own wooden toys and he certainly doesn’t own circle time. If there is a reason to do a thing outside of anthroposophy, and it works for my family and my child, I might do it. If there isn’t, or it doesn’t work, I won’t do it. So, for example, we don’t fuck with medieval humoral theory because we have tons of better ways to understand each other’s personalities and needs. But we do practice letters in a “main lesson book” because it’s fun and it seems to help our kid connect with the information. This approach also helps me to tune into my child’s specific needs, so we started out with a very gentle approach to learning letters and numbers, but as her interest has grown we have followed suit, seeing no more reason to slow down learning to read than we do to push to speed it up.

And yes, we eat both whole wheat and regular pasta in this house.

Tune in next week, when we are going to tackle the adventure that is unschooling.