The following are passages adapted from “unenlightened,”
“quotes,” “humouresque,” “legends,” and “now” (see the tags at the top of this page).
“Unenlightened” is, in part, a memoir of my years as a Waldorf student.

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My focus is not on the school I attended or even on the strange religion it espoused. My topic is the penalty being paid by too many American students today who are receiving educations that oppose the Enlightenment principles on which our nation was founded.

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A child attending a full-fledged Waldorf school will be educated in accordance with Steiner’s dubious theory of human nature. The effects on the child may be profound.

Here’s a glimpse of the Waldorf perspective on human nature. (Also see my essay, “What We’re Made Of.” Click on the tag “oh, humanity” at the top of this page.)

◊ Every true human being (some people are not human, according to Steiner—we’ll look into this, below) eventually has a physical body plus several nonphysical bodies (the “etheric body,” the “astral body,” and the “I”). In order to understand Waldorf teaching methods, you should know that, according to Anthroposophical doctrine, each really human child is in the process of gathering these additional “bodies.” A Steiner-inspired education seeks to facilitate the process of acquiring these bodies. Imagine trying to explain to a public school teacher how a curriculum can be designed to help students manifest their nonphysical bodies. (For more on all this, see my essays, “Unenlightened” and/or “I Went to Waldorf,” on this Web site.))

◊ Students are, by and large, not unique individuals, according to Steiner. Instead, each student represents one of four “temperaments”: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. Waldorf teachers should segregate students into these categories, and discourage any mingling. “The temperaments that are next to each other merge into one another and mingle; so it will be good to arrange your groups as follows: if you put the phlegmatics together it is good to have the cholerics on the opposite side, and let the two others, the melancholics and sanguines, sit between them.” [4] (See my essays “Humouresque” and “Not So Humouresque,” on this Web site.)

◊ Steiner taught that human beings have twelve senses: “First, we have the four senses of touch, life, movement and balance. These senses are primarily permeated by will...The next group of senses, namely smell, taste, sight and temperature are primarily senses of feeling...I need to add that the sense of I and the senses of thought, hearing and speech are more cognitive senses....” [5] Some parts of that quotation probably need clarification. The “sense of the I” is one’s sense of spiritual self-knowledge: “the spiritual sense of our Self.” [Ibid., p. 67.] As for “cognitive senses,” Steiner said that there are several ways for an individual to gain knowledge, including some that function while one is dreaming or asleep. [6]

◊ Deep knowledge of the spirit world(s) becomes available when one develops the necessary “organs” for clairvoyance: “[J]ust as natural forces build out of living matter the eyes and ears of the physical body, so will organs of clairvoyance build themselves....” [7]

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Waldorf teachers participate in a mystic/gnostic system that has significant potential to harm children.

Here’s a revealing comment made by Steiner to Waldorf teachers: “Among the faculty, we must certainly carry within us the knowledge that we are not here for our own sakes, but to carry out the divine cosmic plan. We should always remember that when we do something, we are actually carrying out the intentions of the gods, that we are, in a certain sense, the means by which that streaming down from above will go out into the world.” [8] Note the word “gods.” Anthroposophy is, indeed, a weird religion, and children will be exposed to it—probably indirectly, subtly, secretively—in most Waldorf schools. As Steiner said: “Anthroposophy will be in the school when it is objectively justified, that is, when it is called for by the material itself.” [9] Steiner promoted Anthroposophy as the great, objective truth that underlies all phenomena and knowledge. He also considered Waldorf teachers to be instruments for achieving the “gods’” purposes. So: He is here effectively acknowledging that Anthroposophy will pervade virtually every subject in the Waldorf curriculum. When will Anthroposophy be “called for by the material”? Almost always. Perhaps the best way to summarize this is to say that Steiner wished to brainwash children into pro-Anthroposophical beliefs and views.

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For Steiner and his followers, the truest thinking is not rational cognition or brainwork, which they deem dry and un-heartfelt. Proper “thinking,” in their view, is tempered by imagination: It is more akin to emotion than to cool, rational conceptualizing. For this very reason, it often leads to complication or even mystification rather than to clarity. Ask yourself whether it is what you want for your children. Nothing in the physical world is as it seems. What we see around us isn’t what it is, exactly—there are layers upon layers of hidden deeps. The Anthroposophical solution is to feel one’s way past appearances by opening outwards through imagination or clairvoyance (in Anthroposophy, these terms are sometimes synonymous).

Here’s an example of the sorts of insight “clairvoyance” can lead to: “There are beings that can be seen with clairvoyant vision at many spots in the depths of the earth, especially places little touched by living growths, places, for instance, in a mine which have always been of a mineral nature. If you dig into the metallic or stony ground you find beings which manifest at first in remarkable fashion—it is as if something were to scatter us. They seem able to crouch close together in vast numbers, and when the earth is laid open they appear to burst asunder...The enlightened man knows nothing of them. People, however, who have preserved a certain nature-sense, i.e. the old clairvoyant forces which everyone once possessed...could tell you all sorts of things about such beings. Many names have been given to them, such as goblins, gnomes and so forth...Their nature prompts them to play all sorts of tricks on man....” [10]

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By hook or by crook, children in Waldorf schools are directed toward otherworldly aspirations and beliefs, and they are often diverted from a realistic comprehension of the actual, physical world.

Let’s hear again from Steiner, talking again to Waldorf teachers: “We can accomplish our work only if we do not see it as simply a matter of intellect or feeling, but, in the highest sense, as a moral spiritual task. Therefore, you will understand why, as we begin this work today, we first reflect on the connection we wish to create from the very beginning between our activity and the spiritual worlds.... Thus, we wish to begin our preparation by first reflecting upon how we connect with the spiritual powers in whose service and in whose name each one of us must work.” [11] So, according to Steiner, Waldorf teachers labor in the “service” of “spiritual powers,” and they exercise these labors upon their students.

As to whether Waldorf schools impart a realistic view of the real world, here are some enlightening comments made by Steiner:

◊ “[T]he brain and nerve system have nothing at all to do with actual cognition....” [12]

◊ “[Science] sees the heart as a pump that pumps blood through the body. Now there is nothing more absurd than believing this, for the heart has nothing to do with pumping the blood.” [13]

◊ “With the students, we should at least try to...make it clear that, for instance, an island like Great Britain swims in the sea and is held fast by the forces of the stars. In actuality, such islands do not sit directly upon a foundation; they swim and are held fast from outside.” [14]

◊ “[I]t is not that the planets move around the Sun, but these three, Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, follow the Sun, and these three, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, precede it.” [15]

◊ “[R]ealize that looking at the human head you are looking at the transformed body of your previous earth life, and that the head you had then was the transformed body of your preceding life—you must imagine it without the head, of course. The head you see now is the transformed organism of the last life lived on earth. The rest of the organism as you see it now will be the head in the next life. Then the arms will have metamorphosed and become ears, and the legs will have become eyes.” [16] I must admit, this last one is extremely strange. The gist of it is that Anthroposophists believe in reincarnation.

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I wish that my parents or I had read some of Steiner’s books while I was in a Waldorf school. Surely my parents would have yanked me out fast if they had seen passages such as the ones I’m quoting here. The parents of the other students in my school should have read a few of these books, too. Waldorf would quickly have become depopulated.

If anyone who gets involved with a Waldorf school winds up feeling deceived about the nature and purposes of the school, s/he must accept part of the responsibility.

Steiner frequently spoke with Waldorf teachers about the need to deceive non-Anthroposophists. Three quick examples:

◊ “We also need to speak about a prayer. I ask only one thing of you. You see, in such things everything depends upon the external appearances. Never call a verse a prayer, call it an opening verse before school. Avoid allowing anyone to hear you, as a faculty member, using the word ‘prayer.’” [17]

◊ “Such cases are increasing in which children are born with a human form, but are not really human beings...I do not like to talk about such things since we have often been attacked even without them. Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings....” [18] We’ll examine the subject of people who are not human, below.

◊ When the students at the first Waldorf did poorly in standardized final exams, Steiner said he wished he and the Waldorf faculty dared to be honest about their intentions: “...whether we dare tell those who come to us that we will not prepare them for the final examination at all....” [19]

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The Waldorf school I attended projected the image of a nonsectarian, arts-intensive preparatory school with a progressive curriculum. This appearance undoubtedly led many parents to enroll their children at Waldorf without realizing what they were letting them in for. Even after enrollment, families found Waldorf’s disguise hard to penetrate. We students memorized no passages from holy books, we sang from no hymnals. Yet a strange aura hung about the school. There was a pervasive but unspoken spiritualistic vibe in almost every lesson, in almost every activity. If it was hard for most parents to detect, we students all felt the vibe to one degree or another. It was in the air we breathed, it defined the tenor and subtext of our days. Ultimately, it shaped and colored our educations at least as effectively as if priests were delivering sermons to us. (See my essays, “Unenlightened” and/or “I Went to Waldorf,” on this Web site.)

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Whether or not Steiner was clinically sane, it is frightening that anyone ever took him seriously, much less founded schools devoted to his doctrines.

Above, I said that Steiner taught that some people are not human. Let’s return to a passage I quoted and flesh it out a bit more (the original passage is too long to quote in full, here—but you can easily find it in the book I refer to). The following is a little discussion between Steiner and Waldorf teachers, concerning a first-grade student who had learning disabilities:

[Dr. Steiner]: “Such cases are increasing in which children are born with a human form, but are not really human beings...instead, they are filled with beings that do not belong to the human class. Quite a number of people have been born... [who] are not reincarnated, but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon....”

[A teacher]: “How is that possible?”

[Dr. Steiner]: “Cosmic error is certainly not impossible....

“I do not like to talk about such things since we have often been attacked even without them. Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings....” [20]

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It seems undeniable that, as a general trend, what happened within my Waldorf’s walls decades ago is being replayed now, in different forms, throughout the nation: Various versions of the spirit realm are exalted, while in the terrestrial realm the humane, secular center shrinks, much to our detriment.

Here’s a statement made, not long ago, here in the USA, about what goes on inside Waldorf schools today. The speaker—who is a Waldorf teacher, one who sends his own children to a Waldorf school—first refers to a prayer that students in most Waldorf schools recite every morning. Then he enlarges on his theme: "I'm glad my daughter gets to speak about God every morning...That's why I send her to a Waldorf school. She can have a religious experience. A religious experience. I'll say it again: I send my daughter to a Waldorf school so that she can have a religious experience." [21] (See my essays, “Waldorf Now” and “Non-Waldorf Waldorfs,” on this Web site.)

Perhaps you want your children to have religious experiences. Fine. But do you want that religion to be Anthroposophy?

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I would not want others to go through what I experienced after graduating from a Waldorf school: a long, wearisome struggle to recover from a Waldorf “education” and to find one’s footing in reality.

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“Steiner viewed human beings as consisting of three spheres of activity—the head, the heart, and the will—that manifest through thoughts, feelings and physical actions. To educate children to be complete and balanced human beings, we must attend to the needs of all three aspects of a child’s being. From the Waldorf perspective, attaining knowledge is one purpose of the learning process, but just as important—and perhaps even more important—is to educate the heart and the will of the child, so that knowledge is joined with reverence and action.” [22]

Note that at Waldorf schools, educating hearts and wills is at least as important as—and may be “even more important” than—imparting knowledge. This deviates significantly from a conventional definition of education. Also, clearly, you should ask what is meant by “educating” the heart and the will. What sorts of emotions and desires are Waldorf schools pushing? I’ll sketch in some of the answers in the following two passages.

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In sensitizing a child to the supernatural, Waldorf teachers are at least partially trying to preserve what Anthroposophists say is the child’s innate connection to the spirit realm:

“Childhood is commonly regarded as a time of steadily expanding consciousness.... Yet in Steiner’s view, the very opposite is the case: childhood is a time of contracting consciousness.... [The child] loses his dream-like perception of the creative world of spiritual powers which is hidden behind the phenomena of the senses. This is...the world of creative archetypes and spiritual hierarchies.

“In mastering the world of physical perception the child encounters difficulties in that he first has to overcome a dream-like yet intensely real awareness of spiritual worlds. This awareness fades quickly in early childhood, but fragments of it live on in the child for a much longer time than most people imagine.

“...In a Waldorf school, therefore, one of the tasks of the teachers is to keep the children young.” [23]

Think about the implications of keeping children young as opposed to helping them to mature, especially mentally.

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Waldorf-style “thinking” is intended to be moderated by the faculties of intuition and/or imagination and/or clairvoyance. Taught that logic (i.e., methodical reasoning) is insufficient, the Waldorf student is directed toward spiritual experience that is notionally self-evident (i.e., no proof required). Is this is genuine thinking at all, or merely a form of wishfulness? Consider:

“To what extent will [a child’s] thinking become purely logical and colorless, unenriched by imagination, uninformed by experience? ...More than ever, therefore, should the attempt be made with our adolescents to preserve from the earlier stage of childhood those capacities which are natural to it, and to unite them with the new gift of intellectual thought. For this means to transform thought from what it is at present—the capacity for abstract hypothesis—into the capacity for self-evident spiritual experience.” [24]

Ask yourself whether an education aiming at such a form of “thought” is likely to equip children for life in the real world. In brief: Should we teach our children to live rationally in the real world or to have unsubstantiated intuitions of unseen worlds? (Steiner did not deny that some types of thinking occur in the brain, but he found little significance in such forms of thought. As we have seen, for him “real” thinking means clairvoyance: exercising psychic powers to see what cannot be seen, i.e., what is not real).

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For anyone who does not subscribe to Anthroposophy, Steiner’s blunders must seriously weaken the plausibility of “spiritual science” (i.e., Anthroposophy, the religion that underlies Waldorf “education”). His errors are hard to overlook or excuse. From today’s perspective, Steiner’s racism was a particularly grave error. Perhaps we might explain it away by saying that Steiner was a man of his times, sharing the prevailing views and attitudes (including prejudices) of his times. The trouble with such a defense, for Anthroposophists, is that it undermines the indispensable premise that Steiner, a professed clairvoyant, could see ultimate truth. The whole point of being a soothsayer, after all, is to say sooth: speak truth. Yet Steiner repeatedly failed this paramount test of his “profession.” Once the anti-French card (see below), and the racism card (see below), and the real-thinking-doesn’t-happen-in-the-brain card, and the islands-float card, and the Earth-doesn’t-orbit-the-Sun card, and the-heart-doesn’t-pump-blood card, etc., are pulled out, the entire castle of cards threatens to come crashing down.

Here’s what Steiner said about the French “race” and their language: “The use of the French language quite certainly corrupts the soul. The soul acquires nothing more than the possibility of clichés. Those who enthusiastically speak French transfer that to other languages. The French are also ruining what maintains their dead language, namely, their blood. The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.” [25]

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On the crucial subject of racism:

◊ Steiner taught that the external physical characteristics of the various races reflect and even cause those races’ inner qualities. Hair- and eye-color, for instance, have great significance: “If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense...Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains.” [26]

◊ Racial differences, according to Steiner, are much more than skin deep. He taught that whites are humanity’s vanguard: “On one side we find the black race, which is earthly at most. If it moves to the West, it becomes extinct. We also have the yellow race, which is in the middle between earth and the cosmos. If it moves to the East, it becomes brown, attaches itself too much to the cosmos, and becomes extinct. The white race is the future, the race that is creating spirit.” [27]

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Enough.

If you are thinking about sending your children to a Waldorf school, think long and hard. If you already have children in such a school, consider removing them. My advice? Get them out now.

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For a detailed discussion of Steiner’s teachings and the nature of Waldorf education, click on “unenlightened,” at the top of this page. For a selection of revealing statements made by Steiner, click on “quotations.” I have included several statements from FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER. -- Roger Rawlings

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ENDNOTES

[1] Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998).

[2] Rudolf Steiner, FROM BEETROOT TO BUDDHISM Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), p. 59.

[3] See, e.g., Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy,” 2004, http://www.waldorfcritics.org.)

[4] Rudolf Steiner, RHYTHMS OF LEARNING: What Waldorf Education Offers Children, Parents & Teachers, p. 72.

[5] Rudolf Steiner, THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE, Foundations of Waldorf Education, 1 (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), pp. 142-145.

[6] Ibid., p. 118.

[7] Rudolf Steiner, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT, p. 28.

[8] FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 55.

[9] Ibid., p. 495.

[10] Rudolf Steiner, NATURE SPIRITS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1995), pp. 62-3.

[11] THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE, pp. 33-34.

[12] Ibid., p. 60.

[13] Rudolf Steiner, FREUD, JUNG, AND SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY, pp. 124-125.

[14] FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 607.

[15] Ibid., pp. 30-31.

[16] Rudolf Steiner, POLARITIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF MANKIND (Steiner Books, 1987), p. 59.

[17] FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 20.

[18] Ibid., pp. 649-650.

[19] Ibid., p. 712.

[20] Ibid., pp. 649-650.

[21] Eugene Schwartz, “Waldorf Education—For Our Times or Against Them?”, November 13, 1999, transcript edited by Michael Kopp. Eugene Schwartz is an Anthroposophical writer and educator. He is the author of WALDORF EDUCATION: Schools for the Twenty-First Century (Xlibris Corporation, 2000) and MILLENNIAL CHILD: Transforming Education for the Twenty-First Century (Anthroposophic Press, 1999).

[22] Lawrence Williams, Ed.D., OAK MEADOW AND WALDORF (http://www.oakmeadow.com/resources). Lawrence Williams is an Anthroposophist. He has given an account of the scandal at my old Waldorf school (see my essay, “Unenlightened). Williams is the author of OAK MEADOW AND WALDORF and THE OAK MEADOW TRILOGY (Oak Meadow, Inc., 1997)—see http://www.oakmeadow.com.

[23] A.C. Harwood, PORTRAIT OF A WALDORF SCHOOL (The Myrin Institute Inc., 1956), pp. 15-16. A.C. Harwood had a long career as a Waldorf educator and lecturer. Harwood died in 1975.

[24] Ibid., pp. 23-24.

[25] FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, pp. 558-559.

[26] Rudolf Steiner, HEALTH AND ILLNESS, VOL. 1 (Anthroposophic Press, 1981), pp. 85-86.

[27] Rudolf Steiner, ON THE LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS AND OF THE EARTH (VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE (Verlag Der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, 1961), translated by Roger Rawlings, 2005), p. 62. Some of Steiner’s most dreadful statements are hard, if not impossible, to find in English translations of his works. Here is another example: “White mankind is still on the path of absorbing spirit more deeply into its essence. Yellow mankind is on the path of preserving the period when the spirit is kept away from the body, when the spirit can only be sought outside of the human-physical organization. But the result will have to be that the transition from the fifth cultural epoch to the sixth cultural epoch [i.e., historical periods since the sinking of Atlantis] cannot happen differently than as a violent fight between white mankind and colored mankind in the most varied areas.” [Rudolf Steiner, DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES {The Spiritual Background of the First World War} (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), p. 38, translated by Roger Rawlings, 2005.] Yet even in translations of his various works offered by Anthroposophical presses, we can find his appalling opinions exposed. See the passage I quote, above, about the French “race” and “blacks” (i.e., Africans). Here is another example: “Lucifer and Ahriman...fought against [the] harmonious tendency of development in the evolution of humanity, and they managed to change the whole process so that various developments were shifted and displaced. While there should have been basically only one form of human being...Lucifer and Ahriman preserved [earlier human types]...even into the time after the Atlantean flood. Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded [unimpeded].” [Rudolf Steiner, THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN: THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY, Lectures from 1909-1916 (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), p. 75.] To explicate: In this passage, Steiner is discussing higher and lower races, explaining why humanity is divided into various races instead of comprising a single, highly-evolved race. Lucifer and Ahriman are demonic spiritual powers. “Atlantean” refers to Atlantis. Steiner professed to believe the Atlantis myth, and he traced the “Aryan” race back to it. Consider the following: “The ancestors of the Atlanteans lived in a region [i.e., Lemuria, another lost land] which has disappeared...After they had passed through various stages of development the greatest part of them declined. These became stunted men, whose descendants still inhabit certain parts of the earth today as so-called savage tribes. Only a small part of Lemurian humanity was capable of further development. From this part the Atlanteans were formed. Later, something similar took place. The greatest part of the Atlantean population declined, and from a small portion [which did not decline] are descended the so-called Aryans who comprise present-day civilized humanity...” [Rudolf Steiner, COSMIC MEMORY (Garber Communications, 1990), pp. 45-46.] The Aryans equate with progress; other races descend from “stunted men” and Atlanteans who “declined”—hence, the existence today of “savage tribes.” (See my essay, “Race,” on this Web site.)