Mystic seal for Steiner's play

"The Soul's Probation".

[See, e.g., John Fletcher,

ART INSPIRED BY RUDOLF STEINER (Mercury Arts Publications, 1987), p. 73.

R.R. sketch, 2010.] 

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“Every meditation undertaken for the attainment of Imaginative cognition has its influence, if rightly carried out, upon one or other of these organs [of clairvoyance]. (In my book Knowledge of the Higher Words and its Attainment meditations and exercises are given that take effect on this or that particular organ.) A proper spiritual training will arrange the several exercises in such order as to enable these organs of the soul to develop singly, together, or in due succession, as the case may be. This development asks for great patience and perseverance on the part of the pupil. The degree of patience a man gains in the ordinary course of life will not suffice. For it will be a long time — in many instances a very long time indeed — before the organs are so far developed that the pupil can make use of them for perceiving in the higher world. The moment he does become able to do this, he enters upon the stage of Enlightenment, so-called in contradistinction to the stage of Preparation, Probation or Purification, where the pupil is engaged upon the exercises that are given for the development of the organs. (The word 'Purification' is used, because by means of the exercises he undergoes, the pupil “cleanses” a certain region of his inner life, casting out from it everything that has its source in the external world of the senses.) It may well happen that even before he reaches the stage of Enlightenment, a man will frequently experience sudden flashes that come from a higher world. These he should receive with thankfulness. The fact that he has them enables him already to bear witness to the spiritual world. He must however not weaken in his resolve if no such moments come during the time of Preparation — which may perhaps seem to him to be lasting all too long. Anyone who allows himself to grow impatient because he can still 'see nothing' has not yet succeeded in finding his right relation to a higher world. He alone has done so who can look upon the exercises he undertakes in his training as an end in themselves.”

— Rudolf Steiner, OCCULT SCIENCE - AN OUTLINE 

(Rudolf Steiner Press, 1963) chapter 5, part 4, GA 13.

One of the windows at the Goetheanum, 

the Anthroposophical headquarters. 

“On a high cliff sits man, surrounded by flashing lightening. [sic] In front of him rises a huge world form, with the head of Ahriman. This form carries in its snake-body the planets in sequence of Saturn to Moon. Below is the earth.” 

— Georg Hartmann, THE GOETHEANUM GLASS-WINDOWS (Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, 1972), p. 27. 

[R.R. copy, 2014.]

A Watch Watch "Quote of the Day" from 2011:

“If it is to fulfill its purpose in accordance with the spiritual reality out of which it teaches, then a Waldorf school must be structured and make its administrative and financial decisions in accordance with the same spiritual reality. Those carrying the responsibility for the school — teachers, trustees or board members, and administrators — need to have some understanding of this reality, particularly of the threefold nature of all social and community life. To teach the children on the basis of the reality of the supersensible [i.e., supernatural] world and then work with the money as though no such supersensible world existed is to introduce a dishonesty, a lie, into the life of the school”. — Michael Spence, FREEING THE HUMAN SPIRIT - The Threefold Social Order, Money, and The Waldorf School (Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, 1999), opening words, p. 5.

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Waldorf Watch Response:

Waldorf schools try to embody Rudolf Steiner’s social/political vision, called “threefolding.” [See "Threefolding".] The central idea (derived from Steiner’s numerological leanings) is that societies, like human beings, have three main component parts.* The idea is interesting. But more interesting is what often happens when Waldorf faculties discuss such things. With their attention focused on “practical” questions, they sometimes neglect to keep their guard up concerning matters of the spirit. Here we see an example. Intending to write about school finances, Michael Spence casually mentions the underlying purpose of Waldorf schools, which revolves around “spiritual reality.” The schools “teach the children on the basis of the reality of the supersensible [i.e., supernatural or spiritual] world.” The schools are, in other words, religious — and the religion they practice is Anthroposophy.

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* Three is the number of divine revelation, Steiner taught. [See “Magic Numbers”.]

Following are excerpts from one of Grégoire Perra's 

essays about Waldorf education:

"Nearly Undetectable Influence and Indoctrination".

To read the entire essay, see

"Mistreating Kids Lovingly".

Perra recounts a conversation he had with an old schoolmate,

a former Waldorf student like himself.

[W]e are touching one of the profound elements of the Steiner-Waldorf problem, and I must give him time to get to the bottom of this feeling, so that he can get beyond it and recognize what lies behind it:

"Gaining an emotional grip on someone is a form of seduction by which a seducer makes a person’s ego dependent. The person is made to feel exceptional because of the recognition s/he receives from the seducer. But s/he also thinks s/he will sink into nothingness without the seducer’s approval. The seducer can create this state by the removal of barriers between their inner feelings, but also by providing his victim with the impression that only the seducer sees how special the victim is. Do you remember the poems our class teacher wrote in the lower grades?"

"Yes,” he responds. "Each student received his own poem. It was a poetic description of our deep personalities. One year, one of our classmates received such a rewarding poem that he could still recite it ten years later. It affected him so much, it was as if he were giddy.” 

"It is extremely gratifying when someone takes the trouble to write a poem about you,” I replied. “Who normally writes such poems, except distraught lovers? This explains the nostalgic feeling that alumni of these schools often express. They feel that they were recognized there as they have never been recognized again anywhere else. Because the teachers in these schools do not only ask the students to physically strip down, as they do in kindergarten, but they ask for psychological nakedness as well. They ask the students to reveal their most private thoughts, like during the week spent studying Perceval, when they sometimes ask the students to tell what happened to them at age nine, or when they try to steer students through the transition to puberty. So the students get the impression that their teachers have seen into their souls with great clarity. The teachers begin this process when parents first enroll their children in kindergarten — they ask the parents intimate questions about their marriage and why they wanted to have children, and the teachers maneuver to take charge of the children then. Of course, they make their questions seem wholly professional, seeking to gain deep knowledge of the children entrusted to them. In fact, this unveiling process leads some parents to quickly and easily hand complete authority to the teachers and the school. The psychological effect includes the entire family! In principle, when someone unveils your inner being — which is a pretty rare experience — this creates a lasting connection. When people see deeply inside each other, they will always matter to each other. But then students fall out of the clouds when they realize that their teachers have not really understood them but have only pretended to see deeply inside. This can create a terrible disillusionment at the core! When some students eventually realize that their teachers didn’t really care about what they could become, and didn’t really understand who they were, they begin to realize the falsehood of what they lived through. But they are the lucky ones if they are able to penetrate such terrible deceit, compared with other students who don’t come to this realization and therefore stay caught in their teachers’ psychological grip."

“The Anthroposophical environment is huge and has many intersections. Former Steiner-Waldorf students carry within them a number of ideas, lying dormant, that are Anthroposophical doctrines. Sometimes the ideas will slumber inside for a person's whole life, but sometimes circumstances or a person’s nature will cause them to awaken. In that case, the dormant ideas will change from willful intuitions into pictorial knowledge. In other words, those intuitions will become concepts. This doesn’t happen all the time, of course. Luckily, we have within us forces that resist this kind of manipulation. They are unconscious, but they constitute a powerful opposition. Ask yourself, for example, why you have not enrolled your son in a Steiner-Waldorf school, despite all the love you express today for your old school. In your heart, you know it is not just a matter of money, don’t you?”

“Possibly,” he says thoughtfully. “I have often considered it, but in the end something stopped me and I did not do it. And, besides, my wife wasn’t in favor. But, according to you, why did Steiner create such a system? Why this manipulation of spirits toward embracing Anthroposophy?”

“Simply because, in Steiner's conception of things, a man cannot fulfill his karma if he thinks materialistically,” I reply. “A man isn’t fully human unless he connects with the divine. Steiner says as much early in his book THEOSOPHY. I quote: 'One cannot be a man in the full sense of the word if one hasn’t, one way or another, apprehended the constitution and karma of man as they are revealed by supersensible knowledge.' (Ed. Novalis, page 27). In other words: 'No one can be truly human without possessing some Anthroposophical truths!' Steiner also advised teachers at his first school, in Stuttgart: 'Not recognizing God is a sickness.' (page 124)."

“And if these views are right?” he asks, gazing at me intently.

“I would still object," I respond. “In my view, freedom of thought is more important to your humanity than any ideas you have received. It is better to make mistakes on your own than to have ideas put into your head that blind you. How can one say that anyone who is an atheist is sick? What a lack of respect this shows for individuals’ freedom of conscience! The most important thing is to be sincere with yourself. And to think! That is the true dignity of the individual. And that is what the Steiner-Waldorf schools infringe, imposing their own visions!”

“What you say is valid for adults,” he retorts. “But for children? Isn’t it better for them to receive spiritual ideas? Because children do not control the type of world they inhabit, but they are shaped by what they are given, so how is it wrong to give them an Anthroposophical view of existence?”

“The evil comes in not giving children the tools to evaluate those ideas later,” I say. “To steer them by subtle indoctrination is a violation of their consciences. Conditioning their minds to welcome a special conception of the world is an attack on their free will. It destroys their future ability to think as adults."

— Grégoire Perra

To read an insider's account of life at a Waldorf school

written by a former Waldorf teacher,

go to "Ex-Teacher 2".

"If we do not possess forces such as are expressed in the word ‘faith’, something in us goes to waste; we wither as do the leaves in autumn. For a while this may not seem to matter — then things begin to go wrong. Were men in reality to lose all faith, they would soon see what it means for evolution. By losing the forces of faith they would be incapacitated for finding their way about in life; their very existence would be undermined by fear, care, and anxiety. To put it briefly, it is through the forces of faith alone that we can receive the life which should well up to invigorate the soul. This is because, imperceptible at first for ordinary consciousness, there lies in the hidden depths of our being something in which our true ego is embedded. This something, which immediately makes itself felt if we fail to bring it fresh life, is the human sheath where the forces of faith are active. We may term it the faith-soul, or — as I prefer — the faith-body. It has hitherto been given the more abstract name of astral body. The most important forces of the astral body are those of faith, so the term astral body and the term faith-body are equally justified." 

— Rudolf Steiner, "Faith, Hope and Love: The Third Revelation" (THE GOLDEN BLADE 194), GA 130.

Here is another item from the News page:

At the website "The Toast in the Machine", 

Rachel Playforth has posted a message labeled

"What every parent needs to know (but can’t find out) 

about Steiner schools?"

Here are a few excerpts and a few responses.

“I attended a Steiner school for four years and have mostly positive feelings about it....

"[T]here is no empirical basis for most anthroposophical beliefs/approaches (aka they are INSANE). However I don’t agree that Steiner’s views constitute damning evidence against Steiner schools....

“Even the most mainstream, standardized state education is not based on rigorous scientific principles. As most state school teachers will tell you, it is driven by methodological fashions, policy based on flawed or partial research, and arbitrary targets set by politicians, with very little reference to what we know about child development. None of this means that Steiner schools should NOT be critically examined, it’s just that a lot of the criteria for ‘failing’ this examination would see other forms of schooling fail as well....

“I have a bigger problem with my taxes paying for actual faith schools (eg. 4000+ Church of England schools and 2000+ Catholic schools) than with non-denominational ‘spiritual’ schools becoming [state-supported] academies.”

[http://playforth.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/what-every-parent-needs-to-know-but-cant-find-out-about-steiner-schools/]

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Waldorf Watch Response:

Ms. Playforth writes, "[T]here is no empirical basis for most anthroposophical beliefs/approaches (aka they are INSANE). However I don’t agree that Steiner’s views constitute damning evidence against Steiner schools."

Defenders of Steiner education often attempt to draw a line between Anthroposophy and Steiner schools. But there is really no such line — or if such a line exists, it is a blurred, thin, and broken line. Steiner education is intimately linked to Anthroposophy. [See, e.g., “Oh Humanity” and “Schools as Churches”.] Steiner schools exist, in large part, precisely in order to spread Anthroposophy. As Steiner himself said, 

“One of the most important facts about the background of the Waldorf School is that we were in a position to make the anthroposophical movement a relatively large one. The anthroposophical movement has become a large one.” — Rudolf Steiner, RUDOLF STEINER IN THE WALDORF SCHOOL (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p.156.

Many Waldorf teachers, past and present, have acknowledged that Steiner schools are inextricably bound to Anthroposophy and indeed serve the interests of Anthroposophy. Thus, one former Waldorf teacher has written, 

"The reason many [Waldorf] schools exist is because of the Anthroposophy, period. It's not because of the children. It's because a group of Anthroposophists have it in their minds to promote Anthroposophy in the world ... Educating children is secondary in these schools." — "Baandje". [See "Ex-Teacher 7".]

Likewise, a leading Waldorf educator — who rose to become chairperson of the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City — has written, 

"Waldorf education is a form of practical anthroposophy." — Keith Francis, THE EDUCATION OF A WALDORF TEACHER (iUniverse, 2004), p. xii. Another Waldorf teacher has added, "Waldorf teachers must be anthroposophists first and teachers second." — Gilbert Childs, STEINER EDUCATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE (Floris Books, 1991), p. 166.

If Anthroposophy is insane, then Steiner education is insane. And indeed this point can be made with great clarity. Anthroposophy depends on clairvoyance. If there is no such thing as clairvoyance, then there is no rational basis for Anthroposophy. And if there is no rational basis for Anthroposophy, there is no rational basis for Steiner education. Here’s the kicker: There is no such thing as clairvoyance. Or, at a minimum, we can firmly state that no one has ever produced any convincing evidence for the existence of clairvoyance. [See “Clairvoyance”.] Hence, there is no rational basis for Anthroposophy, which means there is no rational basis for Steiner education.

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Ms. Playforth writes, “Even the most mainstream, standardized state education is not based on rigorous scientific principles ... None of  this means that Steiner schools should NOT be critically examined, it’s just that a lot of the criteria for ‘failing’ this examination would see other forms of schooling fail as well.”

Ms. Playforth evidently thinks that by making a statement about mainstream schools, she has told us something meaningful about Steiner schools. Mainstream schools have shortcomings, she says, hence implicitly Steiner schools are no worse than mainstream schools. But this is clearly illogical. Mainstream schools might have problems and Steiner schools might be much better, or mainstream schools might have problems and Steiner schools might be much worse. The only way to evaluate Steiner schools is to focus on Steiner schools. Put it this way: In a discussion centered on “What every parent needs to know...about Steiner schools,” the subject is Steiner education, not any other form of education. If we conclude — as we should — that Steiner education has significant flaws and shortcomings, then with that question settled, we can turn to the question of finding better sorts of schools. (And there are many.)

Parents are often eager, even desperate, to find alternatives to the mainstream schools in their communities. But not all alternatives to poor-performing mainstream schools are superior. Some alternatives, indeed, are distinctly inferior. Steiner schools are distinctly inferior. [To look closely at Steiner education as it actually exists in the world today, see, e.g., “Waldorf Now”, “Today”, “Academic Standards at Waldorf”, “Curriculum”, “Methods”, etc.]

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Ms. Playforth writes, “I have a bigger problem with my taxes paying for actual faith schools (eg. 4000+ Church of England schools and 2000+ Catholic schools) than with non-denominational ‘spiritual’ schools becoming academies.”

Here Ms. Playforth falls for a pair of central deceptions spread by Anthroposophists. The reality is that Anthroposophy itself is a religion. The inescapable corollary is that Steiner schools are “actual faith schools” — that is, they are religious institutions.

As in so many cases, the deceptions in these matters are, to some degree, instances of Anthroposophical self-deception. Steiner insisted that Anthroposophy is a science, not a religion. His followers today generally accept this article of faith. They think Anthroposophy enables them to objectively, scientifically study the spirit realm through the use of disciplined clairvoyance. And, if Anthroposophy is not a religion, then Steiner schools — even if they embody Anthroposophy — are not religious institutions.

But these Anthroposophical beliefs are false. Anthroposophy is certainly a religion. It combines teachings from Theosophy, gnostic Christianity, and Hinduism, with admixtures of other religions including Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. The practice of Anthroposophy entails faith, reverence, prayers, meditations, spiritual guides, spiritual observances, submission to the gods, and efforts to fulfill the will of the gods. Anthroposophy lays out the path to spiritual improvement and salvation for its adherents, and it threatens spiritual loss and perdition for everyone else. Anthroposophists believe they are on the side of the gods, and they believe their critics are on the side of the demonic powers. Anthroposophy is a religion. [See “Is Anthroposophy a Religion?”]

Moreover, the religion of Anthroposophy is practiced inside Steiner schools. Steiner students are generally required to recite prayers (usually in unison with their teachers), sing religious songs including hymns, participate in religious festivals such as Michaelmas and Advent, and perform such Anthroposophical spiritual rituals as eurythmy. Steiner schools are distinctly religious institutions. Thus, Steiner made such statements as these: 

◊ "It is possible to introduce a religious element into every subject, even into math lessons. Anyone who has some knowledge of Waldorf teaching will know that this statement is true." — Rudolf Steiner, THE CHILD's CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE BASIS OF PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE - Foundations of Waldorf Education XVI (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p. 94. 

◊ "[A] religious atmosphere can be created in every lesson and subject. Such an atmosphere is created in our school. When teachers, through their own soul mood, connect everything that exists in the sensory world to the supersensible and divine, everything they bring to their classes will naturally transcend the physical, not in a sentimental or vaguely mystical way, but simply as a matter of course." — Rudolf Steiner, WALDORF EDUCATION AND ANTHROPOSOPHY - Foundations of Waldorf Education XIV, Vol. 2 (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p. 184.

Occasionally, representatives of the Steiner movement today acknowledge the fundamental religious impulse in Steiner education. Thus, for instance, Steiner teacher Jack Petrash has written, 

“One question that is often asked is: ‘Is a Waldorf school a religious school?’ ... It is not a religious school in the way that we commonly think of religion ... And yet, in a broad and universal way, the Waldorf school is essentially religious.” — Jack Petrash, UNDERSTANDING WALDORF EDUCATION (Nova Institute, 2002), p. 134. 

[For more on the religious nature of Steiner schooling, see, e.g., “Schools as Churches”, “Spiritual Agenda”, “Soul School”, "Prayers", and "Eurythmy".]

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I am glad Ms. Playforth enjoyed the Steiner school she attended. I enjoyed the one I attended. But warm childhood memories should not deflect us from making mature, informed judgments about the Steiner movement today.

— Roger Rawlings

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