Waldorf schools are popular with progressives. But how do you feel about a dose of spiritualism with reading and math?
Is This Grade School a ‘Cult’? (And Do Parents Care?) - Emily Chertoff - the Atlantic
Would you send your kid to a school where faceless dolls and pine-cones are the toys of choice? A school where kids don’t read proficiently until age 9 or 10 — and where time spared goes to knitting and playing the recorder? A school where students sing hymns to “spirit” every day?
Some of the country’s hardest-charging professionals do. In locations like Manhattan, they sometimes fight over spots for their kids. The New York Times recently profiled a Waldorf school populated with the offspring of executives at Google and Apple. The school attracted notice for minimizing the use of technology in classrooms, a strategy common at Waldorf institutions. But the paper saw a paradox in tech workers favoring a school for their children that prohibits most technologies.
Waldorf’s crunchy earth-child ethos is famous, but the schools’ founder and philosophy are less widely known. Rudolf Steiner’s first Waldorf school predates the hippie era by almost 50 years. Steiner started his career as a Goethe scholar in the late 19th century. But as he became less interested in science and more interested in spirituality, his writing began to take a mystical turn. By the turn of the 20th century, he had become a proponent of theosophy — an esoteric belief system centered on ways of knowing God — and founded a society dedicated to promoting his own brand of “anthroposophical” thinking.
Most occultists of the era believed that spirits of the dead regularly attempted to contact or enter the world of the living. Steiner was more interested in the opposite possibility. He believed the living could cultivate the ability to enter the spirit world. After World War I, the director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany — an adherent of anthroposophy — invited Steiner to create a school for the children of factory workers. This was Steiner’s chance to train children who could initiate such spiritual contact.