Waldorf Schools Are Inherently Racist Cults

Or, why I wouldn’t drink the kool-aid.

[By] Jennifer Sapio, PhD

...After earning my PhD in 2017 and applying to 68 institutions of learning, I frantically accepted the one job I was offered, at a Waldorf school in Central Texas. However, I very soon observed a disconnect between what parents understand is being offered by the school and what teachers are discussing inside the faculty meetings...

Parents are told about a “holistic approach to child development,” in which students do handwork, play string instruments, and study cultures from around the world [4] ... The average family enrolled at a Waldorf school probably doesn’t know much about the founder of the movement, Rudolf Steiner [5], his...“spiritual science” [6], or his writings which range from...disputing contemporary psychology and physics [7], to travelogues detailing trips to other planets [8].

When I was hired, I knew nothing about Rudolf Steiner... 

During a conversation at my final interview, one of the faculty members asked if at least I would be okay with saying a “verse” to commence and conclude faculty meetings [9] ... I thought that would be the extent of the compliance required of me... 

However, I discovered that much more was required of me philosophically, morally, and spiritually [10] ... [A] “Master Waldorf Teacher” who [gave us a presentation] said, “if you are not on board with this kind of spiritual striving, then you should find somewhere else to work.”

What seemed to be valued was not years in the classroom, experience or expertise...but rather adherence to the philosophies of a White twentieth-century thinker’s [11] spiritual ideology. Being able to speak in Steiner’s vocabulary of “astral bodies” [12] and “Ahrimanic forces” [13] was essential to inclusion in the good graces of the faculty body ... When I suggested that we bring the latest research on a topic like classroom management or child development into the conversation, I was told, “Rudolf Steiner was clairvoyant, and when you find the truth, there’s no improving on it” [14]. There was no room for disagreement or alternate perspectives in a community founded on the value-judgment that Steiner’s ideas about education in 1919 were essentially infallible [15].   

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...[I]ncreasingly the requirements for my adoption of anthroposophical values became part of the “other duties as assigned” in my contract. Reading Rudolf Steiner’s philosophical texts...was a required part of my work as a teacher at the school.

In our required readings, I found hateful, illogical, and disgusting concepts about race [16], Euro-centrism [17], and vaccines [18], to name a few...

I read about Steiner’s “folk souls” [19] — his theories about the hierarchies of human evolution [20] — in order to see in Steiner’s own words what he thinks about the “black and yellow races,” and let me tell you, it’s revolting. He writes that humans are on an evolutionary journey through reincarnation [21] and that as souls are refined and purified, they move “up” from the African to the Asian and finally to the European races:

Diagram 3 from Rudolf Steiner’s “The Mission of Folk-Souls”

I read about Steiner’s rejection of Eastern philosophies [22] and his prioritizing of Western European knowledge, which explains why many students at Waldorf schools still read a high-German medieval romance [23] in eleventh grade rather than Toni Morrison. No amount of organizing diversity conferences for Waldorf teachers will ever fix this fundamental problem in the foundation of the schools’ pedagogy [24].

Finally, during the time that I was a part of a Waldorf school, they were repeatedly in the news. Unfortunately, it was because they have been identified as the “worst” school in Texas as far as vaccine compliance is concerned, a direct result of Steiner’s belief that childhood illness is part of each human’s “karma” [25]. Thus, Waldorf schools are a magnet for anti-vaxxers, a particularly troubling correlation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

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When the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing — between my work and my integrity — became increasingly difficult to tolerate, I reached out to my supervisors, one of whom is a Person of Color. We talked about how problematic I found what I was learning about the Waldorf school movement, about Rudolf Steiner, and about his spiritual program of anthroposophy. I was assured that there were a variety of interpretations, and that the good outweighed the bad [26].

But really we were all complicit in the white supremacist mission that is Waldorf education globally [27]...

The complicity was guaranteed by a few factors. The same kind of bullying and gaslighting and “us versus them” tactics as are used in other religious (ie. cultish) environments apply in this case, too [28].

As I had been warned, indeed there are verses chanted during faculty meetings. We all stood and listened as a passage was recited about heavenly archai [29] sharing a drop of wisdom with us. Okay, I kept saying to myself, it’s just a pretty piece of literature, right? But. I. Stood. Up. During. Those. Prayers. For. Almost. Three. Years...

The Waldorf movement in the United States is experiencing a transition, as [Waldorf] teaching centers [30] are not attracting the candidates that are needed to fill jobs in Waldorf schools. So, traditionally educated teachers have been filling these posts across the country [31], leading schools to greater and lesser degrees away from their anthroposophical roots ... But in some Waldorf schools, there is an effort underway to purify the “core values” of the community, to reassure the community that anthroposophy is at the center of the school, and to close ranks and go on the defensive about all things Steiner. I was told that there was a “sickness” in the school that could only be cured by my acquiescing to this indoctrination [32].

At the Waldorf school where I worked, it wasn’t enough to be a good teacher. You must become a “Waldorf teacher” [33]. Waldorf becomes not the name of a school, but a group that you join, an identity that you become...

...[T]here is something insidious about the bait and switch tactic of a school that attracts the world’s progressive secular humanists into its folds, and swears as it is inculcating spiritual ideology (at least in the faculty body, if not indirectly in the student and parent body as well) that it is not [34]. The legalese of offering a pedagogy based in Steiner’s spiritual anthroposophy (his racist, colonialist project) but technically not calling it a religious school is difficult for me to reconcile [35]...

[I submitted] my resignation.

[6/27/2020    https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/waldorf-schools-are-inherently-racist-cults-91193d1fbef6    Dr. Sapio's essay was originally posted on June 13.]