I Guess It's Time To Talk About Rudolf Steiner
The THIRD installment of my series about education and homeschooling
The danger is writing about a person who many people adore is that people will get mad at you. So it is not without some trepidation that I share with you, today, some of my thoughts and knowledge about the man, the legend, Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner is the father of the Waldorf education model, and part of my ongoing research has involved learning a whole lot about both Waldorf itself and the dude behind it. Buckle up!
To start with, I would like to make a simple yet decorative wooden sign, artfully painted, for you to hang in your mind as you read this. On the sign there is some lettering, using all natural eco-friendly non-toxic paints, and it says: My views about Rudolf Steiner do not apply to all Waldorf teachers, all Waldorf schools, or all Waldorf parents. I actually like some Waldorf stuff! Really, it’s fine! In fact, we started homeschooling with a “Waldorf Inspired” curriculum and do some vaguely “Waldorfy” type things at home. On Friday we are going to talk more about the application and activities, but today we are just talking about the dude. So if you think this is about you, I promise, unless you are the ghost of Rudolf Steiner, it is not.
Many years ago, we considered sending our kid to a Waldorf school, and even went through part of the application process. That included a guided tour through the very cute classrooms and a little talk about the history of the specific school, and Waldorf education generally.
It sounded a bit like this.
“Rudolf Steiner was a brilliant scientist who later went on to become a philosopher, and then he got interested in education and he invented this wonderful new educational system that was much better for children than anything else. He told his friend, who owned the Waldorf Cigarette Factory, and his friend decided to pay for him to make a school, that way all the children of the factory workers could benefit from this wonderful new method of learning! Isn’t that great?”
Sure sounds great, right? I can’t think of anything better than working in a cigarette factory and knowing that my boss and his buddy control my kid’s school.
So who the fuck was Rudolf Steiner, and what was his deal?
Rudy (as I will refer to him from here on out) was born in 1861, and he was like, super into Goethe. While he did have some background in the sciences and “philosopher” is a word you could use about him I guess, most profiles that aren’t written by his doting admirers more accurately describe him as either a spiritualist or an occultist. The spiritualist movement was largely about the idea that spirits of the dead could contact living people. The specifics of where he diverged from the more “mainstream” part of the movement can get technical and honestly boring. He invented his own thing called anthroposophy, which was based on his beliefs and ideas and golly gee there is some debate over whether it is a religion or a philosophy (Rudy called it a science, which is, hm, you know what, what are words?). The important bit as it relates to education is that he thought all humans were capable of “spiritual work” but that we were too bogged down in like, material stuff, and intellectual work, man! Old Rudy thought that if people were educated the right way they could better develop those abilities. Maybe you can see where this is going!
From that background, Rudy’s creation of a school for poor kids funded by his buddy seems less like a great act of altruism and more like… experimenting on poor kids to see if they can talk to ghosts. It’s a little more complicated than that and what seems true is that he did think it would improve the kids’ overall lives as well, which is nice.
What else do you need to know about Old Rudy? He was super racist! How racist was he? He ranked the races, with white being the most bestest, and since he believed in reincarnation and his own version of karma (seriously very much is own), he thought that a more evolved soul would be reincarnated as white. He also said that Black people shouldn’t be allowed in Europe. People who love Rudy will remind you that he was not technically a nazi and in fact disagreed with Hitler, which I guess is a low bar that he did in fact clear, while still being shockingly racist.
His beliefs about reincarnation impacted his other ideas. He believed that any diseases or troubles in this life were caused by karma from previous lives, and would therefore need to be worked through so as not to impact you in future lives. He was against vaccines because he saw them as interfering with that process. In one of his lectures, he extended this idea to left-handedness, stating that children who write with the left hand do so because of a karmic debt and therefore it must be corrected so they can move on. Now, at the time “correcting” left handedness was the norm, but our pal Rudy made it a spiritual imperative. Fun times, cool guy!
Did he invent organic farming? Kinda sorta. He’s often credited with it, but I would say more accurately that his own version (called biodynamic farming) was created around the same time lots of other folks were questioning the use of chemical agents in farming. His ideas do tend to permeate in crunchier circles, even outside of schools, and this is part of the reason.
There is not enough space in the world to list all of the kooky things Rudy thought, because the dude wrote just a truly incredible amount of books about his various thoughts. He definitely wrote that Jesus was super cool, and also that Buddha traveled to Mars and did the same thing on Mars that Jesus did on earth. There’s some stuff about Atlantis… it’s a lot!
But this is a series about education, you are saying! Who cares what he thought about Martian salvation! Let’s talk about learning!
Well, our buddy Rudy thought childhood happened in three distinctive stages, all of about seven years, that were almost like separate incarnations themselves. Children need to be taught very differently during the different stages. There are, according to Rudy, physical indicators that a child is entering the next stage.
Waldorf teachers often say that teaching children to read very young puts too much pressure on them, can make reading less interesting be over-emphasizing the mechanics of phonics, and cuts down on necessary time for play. You can agree with those things in and of themselves (I personally… kind of do? It’s complicated!). But the root reason Waldorf education emphasizes waiting to learn to read is that academics are not suited for the first stage of development according to Rudolf Steiner, which ends around age seven. Signs that a child is ready can include a greater ability to sit still and more interest in academics, but also things like “looking longer” and “losing the baby fat of the cheeks” and of course, “losing the milk teeth.” Reading before you lose your first tooth? No ghosts for you! (I’m joking. Kind of. Mostly)
He was also into categorizing children based on personality type, or temperament. And what are the four temperaments based on? Why, medieval humoral medical theory, of course! According to Rudy, a child is either choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholic, and educators should seek to sort kids into those categories so they can offer support specific to the child’s temperament. And just like with the stages of growth, he taught that there were physical characteristics that tended to go along with each one!
Those are just a handful of things that it is maybe good to know about Rudolf Steiner, a very chill dude who invented the educational model known as Waldorf based on his very normal ideas about life, the world, and suchlike. Remember our artful wooden sign from the beginning? Well, let’s look at it again. There is a question that I want to address here and it is this: If Rudolf Steiner was such a dick, does that make Waldorf bad? How much does Rudolf Steiner being a dick impact education at Waldorf Schools today? What about Waldorf homeschooling?
The answer is one we’re going to wade into more next time. The short version is that you know, it varies quite a bit actually! In general I would say Rudy’s awfulness has some impact, often more than any of us would like to believe. Again, that doesn’t mean parents are monsters for sending their kids to a Waldorf school (I know many children who go to Waldorf schools, they are happy and well adjusted and love their school and it seems fine). And it is important to acknowledge that in general, Waldorf educated kids seem to do well in academics despite the nutty ideas (I tend to think not that this means the base ideas are legit, but that in spite of those ideas Waldorf educators have accidentally stumbled upon practices that are good for kids for unrelated reasons).
But while people pick and choose which of his ideas to adopt, I’ve found that way more people (especially Waldorf teachers) buy into some of his more ridiculous ideas than I would expect.
And while thinking that Buddha went to Mars is probably harmless, thinking that white children are inherently more spiritually evolved than children of color is not.
Next time, we’re going to talk about the application of these ideas, Waldorf style activities and what I think parents can do about being attracted to some of this stuff while also disliking the dude.
AND in case you are curious, here are a few sources. Because I have been off and on reading about this dude for a couple years now, this is not an exhaustive list of everywhere I have gathered info, but it’s what I’ve got for you today. A note about the last source on the list, Waldorf Watch: it’s a website made by a very disgruntled man who attended a Waldorf school, and hated it, and it reads a bit like a conspiracy theory website. I do not subscribe to his interpretations and have used the website very sparingly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-28646118