Vitnira
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I've done reading on Waldorf education since it's a fascinating way to school children. One of its major advantages is that it actually gives children focused attention and growth, and nurtures them to express themselves creatively. It also encourages them to have practical creative skills like "handcraft" (sewing, balling yarn), attentive focus on completing a project, physical dance, and various arts. This is all of what is told to parents that enroll their children in Waldorf schools (and it is true). To me another benefit is a focus on teaching mythology and folk tales, especially Germanic, and what the stories mean.
But Waldorf school has many other ideas associated with it that are hard to explain. Waldorf educaton's founder, Rudolf Steiner, also created the 'religion' of Anthroposophy. This asserts that higher planes, deities, spirits all exist if one nurtures the clairvoyance required to see them, and Waldorf school aims to nurture this ability in children. Sounds pretty cool to me! But... it also has some very strange quotes I encountered right at the beginning of one of his more notable books, "How to Know Higher Worlds":
Definitely the sort of thing I'd write if I was trying to start a cult. And Waldorf school definitely infuses the nurturing of "having devotional reverence for leaders", especially towards teachers and principals.
I thought this article was a great overview of Waldorf. It's a critical view that provides insight into what is taught:
I went to Waldorf
The article is long but before discussion here I'd highly recommend at least skimming it. If you really can't be bothered to do that I'll provide some key quotes:
Personally I don't think I'd send my children to a Waldorf school. There are certainly some ideas in there that are gems I'll lift for my homeschool curriculum, but the school as it stands sounds veryyyy culty. To me this feels like the kind of schooling Atlanteans would do for their priests (ensuring they're still subservient to kings and gods). Steiner claimed to have gotten his ideas from clairvoyance of the higher realms.
So folks, what do you think of Steiner? Waldorf school? Do you think he actually tapped into a higher realm to acquire knowledge of spirital pedagogy? Do you think he's a nutcase cult leader? Would you send your kids to a Waldorf school if one was available?
But Waldorf school has many other ideas associated with it that are hard to explain. Waldorf educaton's founder, Rudolf Steiner, also created the 'religion' of Anthroposophy. This asserts that higher planes, deities, spirits all exist if one nurtures the clairvoyance required to see them, and Waldorf school aims to nurture this ability in children. Sounds pretty cool to me! But... it also has some very strange quotes I encountered right at the beginning of one of his more notable books, "How to Know Higher Worlds":
If you have ever stood before the door of someone you revered, filled with holy awe as you turned the doorknob to enter for the first time a room that was a "holy place" for you, then the feeling you experienced at that moment is the seed that can later blossom into your becoming a student in an occult, esoteric school. To be gifted with the potential for such feelings is a blessing for every young person. We should not fear that such feelings of reverence lead to subservience and slavery; on the contrary, a child's reverence for others develops into a reverence for truth and knowledge. Experience teaches that we know best how to hold our heads high in freedom if we have learned to feel reverence when it is appropriate—and it is appropriate whenever it flows from the depths of the heart.
...
Our civilization is more inclined to criticize, judge, and condemn than to feel devotion and selfless veneration. Our children criticize far more than they respect or revere. But just as surely as every feeling of devotion and reverence nurtures the soul's powers for higher knowledge, so every act of criticism and judgment drives these powers away.
Definitely the sort of thing I'd write if I was trying to start a cult. And Waldorf school definitely infuses the nurturing of "having devotional reverence for leaders", especially towards teachers and principals.
I thought this article was a great overview of Waldorf. It's a critical view that provides insight into what is taught:
I went to Waldorf
The article is long but before discussion here I'd highly recommend at least skimming it. If you really can't be bothered to do that I'll provide some key quotes:
Arriving at the school each day was like entering a refuge from worldly turmoil. The morning began with a prayer, although no one called it that — we called it a "morning verse." In the lower grades, after reciting the "verse," we had classes about myths and Bible stories (Steiner believed myths are true clairvoyant reports of the spirit world, whereas the Bible is almost true, needing to be reinterpreted in light of his own teachings). Interspersed with these supernatural lessons, there were classes in math and geography and history: regular subjects, although they were trimmed and modulated in ways we did not understand. We had no textbooks — we copied lessons written on the chalkboards for us by our teachers. The school's library was small — only the Waldorf worldview, and texts that might seem to confirm it, were available to us. Reading was not emphasized or, indeed, taught in the lower grades. We had no "Weekly Reader," no "Dick and Jane." Nor were modern teaching aids used, things such as movies; there was something repugnant, even evil, about them, although we were not told what.
The teachers urged us to imaginatively identify with whatever we studied or saw — to feel the life-force coursing through a tree, or absorb an eagle's noble spirit, or experience the meaning of a boulder.
Christ was important at Waldorf, but He was Christ as reinvisioned by Rudolf Steiner. He was not the Son of God worshipped in Christian churches; He was the Sun God, the same god known in other traditions by such names as Ra, Apollo, and Baldr. [21] We not told this, directly. We had to absorb the "truth" from the misty atmosphere of the school — or wait to absorb it later in life, or in a later incarnation. Anthroposophists are patient.
[Our headmaster,] Mr. Gardner laid out for us the overarching structure of the family of man. He explained that the various races stood at different levels of moral development — each was forging its own destiny. He said these things sympathetically, with no hint of condescension. Yet the vibe was in the room that morning: The terms he used were more metaphysical than biological. The oriental races, he said, are ancient, wise, but vitiated. The African races are youthful, unformed, childlike, he said. Standing near the center of humanity's family are the currently most advanced races, the whites, he said. He was giving us a modified version of Steiner's views.
My class's homeroom teacher during the elementary grades was Carol Hemingway Gardner, John Gardner's wife. She was a tender, motherly woman — I think every kid in the class loved her. I was sorry to think of her following her husband into disgraced retreat. I still remember her fondly, although I now realize that she — in the gentlest manner possible, and I'm sure with pure motives — began my introduction to the mythic/religious visions of Anthroposophy. The class history printed in our 1964 yearbook includes the following:
"In the third grade we began our study of the Bible, and put on a play about Joseph's coat of many colors ... Besides the three R's, the fourth grade was occupied with the study of Norse myths. The high point of the year was the building of Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life, out of paper. The fifth grade, where we learned about Greek and Egyptian myths, was our last with Mrs. Gardner."
For Steiner and his followers, the truest thinking is not rational cognition or brainwork, which they deem dry and un-heartfelt. The form of "thinking" Steiner advocated is more akin to emotion than to cool, rational conceptualizing, and it often leads to complication or even mystification rather than to clarity. Ask yourself whether this is what you want for your children. Steiner taught that we must regain our ancient powers of clairvoyance, raising them to new, higher levels of spiritual insight. We must open outwards through "imagination," which Steiner taught is form of clairvoyance. According to Steiner:
"Essentially, people today have no inkling of how people looked out into the universe in ancient times when human beings still possessed an instinctive clairvoyance ... If we want to be fully human, however, we must struggle to regain a view of the cosmos that moves toward Imagination again...." [12]
We must return to clairvoyance, which is imagination. On this path, intellect and the brain are mere way stations; our true goal is to transcend them, reaching new, higher or "exact" forms of clairvoyance. As Steiner said on another occasion:
"I have described...how the intellectual is further developed into conscious, exact clairvoyance ... Through such a higher consciousness — imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness — man may reach in self-knowledge beyond his intellect and know himself as part of the supersensible [i.e., supernatural] world ." [13]
As for the intellect, we must leave it behind (once we have used it in our quest to become exactly clairvoyant) .
"The intellect destroys or hinders." [14]
As for the brain itself, it has little if any value (except to the extent that it enables our brief visit to intellect on our path to exact clairvoyance).
"[T]he brain and nerve system have nothing at all to do with actual cognition." [15]
Personally I don't think I'd send my children to a Waldorf school. There are certainly some ideas in there that are gems I'll lift for my homeschool curriculum, but the school as it stands sounds veryyyy culty. To me this feels like the kind of schooling Atlanteans would do for their priests (ensuring they're still subservient to kings and gods). Steiner claimed to have gotten his ideas from clairvoyance of the higher realms.
So folks, what do you think of Steiner? Waldorf school? Do you think he actually tapped into a higher realm to acquire knowledge of spirital pedagogy? Do you think he's a nutcase cult leader? Would you send your kids to a Waldorf school if one was available?