Waldorf
schools, which began in the esoteric mind of the Austrian philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, have forged a unique blend of progressive and
traditional teaching methods that seem to achieve impressive results --
intellectual, social, even moral
DRIVING
down out of the foothills of Yuba County, California, at dawn recently,
past wide, flat fruit orchards, abandoned stony gold mines, and endless
river levees, I asked my escort, Ruth Mikkelsen, the principal of the
local school for juvenile offenders, what the area's main industry was.
"Methamphetamine," she said with a chuckle. Yuba County lives with some
of California's most dismal demographic statistics. Its unemployment
rate is 12.8 percent, twice the state average. Teen pregnancy rates and
the proportion of children on welfare are among the state's highest.
The county sends a larger percentage of its adults to prison than any
other county in the state. It also has the highest proportion of
children classified as low-income (68 percent), and the state's
stingiest dads when it comes to child-support payments.
As
we entered Marysville, the county seat, we passed a scattering of
burnt-out storefronts bandaged with dry, broken boards -- reminders
that until the 1950s this town was locally famous for its rich economy
of bars, brothels, opium dens, and gambling houses. Descendants of
those days now fill Ruth Mikkelsen's classrooms at Thomas E. Mathews
Community School. "If you take all the kids who are being thrown out of
school and put them in one room, those are the kids we have," Mikkelsen
said. "One of those kids in a normal class will pretty much destroy
that class." It was easy to see what she meant. When we pulled up to
the school, a group of boys playing basketball on a crumbling court out
front were guarding each other with real hostility. Inside, a dozen
boys and girls, dressed in the school's official uniform of blue jeans
and white T-shirts, jostled and sassed each other in the tiny common
room. One hulking skinhead leaned against the wall, alone,
slump-shouldered, quiet, angry.
Underneath
this toughness, one could see signs of softness and hope. Before I'd
even started exploring, Gary, a skinny fourteen-year-old, spontaneously
grabbed me for a quick tour of what I had come to watch: how the
Waldorf-school movement, an old, Austria-bred system of private
education, is working in a new venue -- a hard-boiled public
institution for troublemakers. After introducing me to each of his
teachers, Gary walked me past the primary tools of the Waldorf day: the
recorders every student learns to play, the numerous paintings and art
projects, and a pile of "main lesson books" -- lengthy creative reports
by students on their studies in each academic subject, which they must
generate every few weeks.
Later,
during an English class, I noticed a fifteen-year-old I'll call Robert
waving his hand desperately. A small boy with an angelic walnut-brown
face, Robert had been expelled from his previous school for smoking
marijuana; soon after his arrival at Mathews, he jumped out the
probation officer's window and ran away. On the day I visited, Robert
sat attentive throughout a two-hour class. When the teacher finally
called on him, he flawlessly recited six lines memorized from The
Merchant of Venice. In the early days, Evelyn Arcuri, the teacher, said
later, when she asked the students to return their materials, "they
would just toss stuff at me. Now there's better control. They're more
engaged." I noticed something similar. One twelve-year-old boy sat with
me after school, regaling me, in enthusiastic detail, with a creative
mixture of Greek and Roman history. The boy could barely read, but he'd
been inspired by the oral storytelling that Waldorf teachers emphasize.
These roughnecks even like Waldorf's focus on art. Thomas, an outgoing
and restless seventeen-year-old, had found that when he was forced to
draw pictures of stories he had read or heard, "you get more visual
ideas of what you're doing." Arcuri believes she can see that the
students are learning more from what they draw. "This year kids are
saying, 'Can I take this home?' We never had that happen before."
Mikkelsen
and her teachers attribute these changes to the battery of skills they
learned at Rudolf Steiner College, a small private school near
Sacramento that serves as the West Coast teacher-training center for
Waldorf schools. Much of what teachers learn there is how to reach
children through all their senses. Child-development experts have long
advocated a multisensory approach to learning -- as a way both to
deeply imprint lessons in a youngster and to accommodate the different
learning styles that are bound to exist among diverse students,
particularly those with learning difficulties. Yet few education
systems in this country have the history with these methods that
Waldorf schools do. "I now have a way to give it to them many times, in
different ways," Arcuri told me. "We had tried everything with these
kids," Mikkelsen recalls. "Nothing worked. You can't lecture to them.
Independent study doesn't work. They need constant support and a lot of
socializing." During Mikkelsen's discussions with teachers at the
Steiner College, "I said to them, 'If this is so good, if Rudolf
Steiner is as hot as you say, then this will work for our kids.
Otherwise, it's another bunch of elitist B.S.'"
Several
years later an outside evaluator dropped by the Mathews School. After
his visit he told Mikkelsen that the effectiveness of her program for
juvenile offenders couldn't be fairly judged, because it was clear that
she did not have truly problem kids. "I suddenly realized it was
working," Mikkelsen recalls. John Cobb, the local probation manager,
has a similar impression. "Kids who can't make it anywhere else can
make it here," he told me.
The
main lesson books at Mathews and other Waldorf schools illustrate
Waldorf's unusual mixture of teaching techniques. The books are filled
with students' careful records of field trips and classroom
experiments; impressions of the teachers' regular oral presentations;
and, in more advanced classes, syntheses of what the students have read
in primary sources. (Waldorf teachers avoid textbooks, considering
their digested information a poor substitute for original material.)
The texts were neatly handwritten, with fountain pens. They were also
often accompanied by detailed drawings and poetry, some of which the
students had written themselves. Playfulness is encouraged in these
books, because Waldorf teachers believe that imaginative wonderings can
be just as educational as objective facts and conclusions, if not more
so.
This
notion, that imagination is the heart of learning, animates the entire
arc of Waldorf teaching. When that concept is coupled with the schools'
other fundamental goal, to give youngsters a sense of ethics, the
result is a pedagogy that stands even further apart from today's system
of education, with its growing emphasis on national performance
standards in subjects such as mathematics, science, and reading and its
increasing rigor in standardized testing -- to say nothing of the
campaign to fill classrooms with computers. This is not to suggest that
Waldorf schools have a monopoly on contrarian ideas; Quaker and other
religious schools teach ethics too. And various alternative private
schools have been practicing innovative approaches to learning for
years. Obviously, some Waldorf practices will resemble those in many of
these schools. But that makes the Waldorf method all the more
intriguing, because the daily experiences of one creative education
system ought to tell us something about the challenges and
possibilities for other schools, both alternative and traditional.
It
is odd, actually, that the public knows so little about Waldorf
schools, because they've been operating in this country since 1928 and
have collected quite a few famous followers (Waldorf parents have
included Paul Newman, Joe Namath, John DeLorean, and Mikhail
Baryshnikov; graduates include Victor Navasky, the publisher of The
Nation, and Ken Chenault, the president of American Express). During
the past twenty-five years in particular, Waldorf schools have
proliferated vigorously; roughly 130 now operate in the United States,
and 700 worldwide. Waldorf schools are quite possibly the world's
fastest-growing independent school system; David Alsop, the chairman of
the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, calls them the
world's "best-kept education secret."
The
secret is getting out. In the past decade a dozen public schools have
adopted Waldorf methods, in an effort to enliven classrooms that many
educators see as having become sterile job factories. Unfortunately,
some of the Waldorf methods have caused trouble of their own, both in
public schools and in private Waldorf classrooms. There has been
controversy and a lawsuit, stemming largely from the attention that
Waldorf teachers pay to an unorthodox form of spirituality. (To some
critics, this threatens the prevailing taboo against teaching religion
in a public school.) Running through these bumps, however, is a
substantial record of achievement -- one that has earned the respect of
a number of leading figures, from Howard Gardner, the prominent Harvard
professor of education and psychology, to the well-known education
reformer Theodore Sizer, to Saul Bellow, whose hero in the novel
Humboldt's Gift is fascinated by the philosophy of Waldorf's creator.
Proletarian Beginnings
WALDORF
education was born one spring day in 1919, when Rudolf Steiner, a
maverick Austrian philosopher and scientist, visited the
Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, to give a
speech to its workers. The First World War had ended just five months
earlier, and Steiner talked about the need for a new social order, a
new sense of ethics, and a less damaging way of resolving conflict.
After the lecture Emil Molt, the factory owner, asked Steiner if he
would consider starting a school for the workers' children. Steiner
agreed, insisting on some conditions, including that his school be run
by the teachers. (That rule has spawned occasionally chaotic but
cooperative styles of Waldorf-school management today. And it
prefigured the modern-day theory, popularized by the Yale psychiatrist
and school reformer James Comer, that for education to work, teachers
and parents must be involved in school decisions.) Steiner also
insisted on a highly ambitious curriculum. "The need for imagination, a
sense of truth and a feeling of responsibility -- these are the three
forces which are the very nerve of education," he once said. Twenty
years after the Stuttgart school opened, the Nazis shut it down, along
with six other Waldorf schools that had sprung up by then. The reason,
according to the state press at the time, was that Germany had no room
for two kinds of education -- one that educated citizens for the state
and another that taught children to think for themselves.
By
then seven other Waldorf schools had been started around the world --
three in Switzerland, and one each in London, Budapest, Oslo, and New
York City. (The Waldorf schools in Germany reopened after the Nazi
regime collapsed, and the German contingent now numbers approximately
140.) Today, although the schools' Old World academic philosophy runs
counter to some academic trends, it may dovetail with others. "All the
things you read about public schools," Mikkelsen told me, "that you
need to do this, you need to do that -- hell, they've been doing it for
eighty years."
Mikkelsen
was referring to myriad reforms that policymakers incessantly propose
to reverse a range of problems besetting American youngsters: gradually
weakening morality and family structure; students' shrinking capacity
for creativity and self-discipline, and their increasing turns to
violence; diminishing appreciation for the nuances of language in
reading, writing, and conversation; and graduates' spotty preparation
for the professional world. When pressed on such issues, school
administrators often grumble that they're being asked to handle
problems better solved outside school -- at home or, later, in the
workplace. That may miss the main piece in the education puzzle. Steve
Grineski, the interim dean of the College of Education and Human
Services at Moorhead State University, in Minnesota, said, speaking
before the Littleton, Colorado, horror, "The most serious problem in
schools is kids not getting along. The reason people get fired isn't
their lack of job skills, it's their lack of social skills." That is
precisely why Mikkelsen was attracted to Waldorf. "It's like learning
to be a really good parent, plus tapping into every creative thing you
ever thought of," she says. Ben Klocek, a high school senior at the
Sacramento Waldorf School, whose family has been involved in Waldorf
for years, says, "Have you ever heard of that thing about emotional
intelligence?" He is referring to Daniel Goleman's provocative book
Emotional Intelligence (1995), which suggested that IQ isn't nearly as
important as personal traits such as self-awareness, confidence, and
flexibility. "Waldorf," Klocek says, "gives you very high emotional
intelligence."
Although
the Mathews School has embraced Waldorf teaching techniques with
enthusiasm, it has chosen to forgo parts of the Waldorf curriculum,
which can be too involved for a thinly educated student body that comes
and goes as this one does. I was eager, therefore, to visit some of the
private Waldorf schools elsewhere in California and on the East Coast,
where the full program has been practiced for decades. There, I hoped,
I would see how both teachers and students have fared in their attempts
to realize Steiner's dreams of enriching people's imaginations and
ethical sensibilities, and putting them to work in modern daily life.
The Primacy of Imagination
WALDORF
teachers offer roughly the same subjects other teachers do. Before
introducing facts, however, they take a few steps back, and sideways.
Rudolf
Steiner believed that people actually have twelve senses -- the
accepted five plus thought, language, warmth, balance, movement, life,
and the individuality of the other. Vague as some of these additional
"senses" sound, most of them have been roughly confirmed by modern
research. John Bloom, who was the administrator of the San Francisco
Waldorf School at the time of my visit, said, "We try to engage and
connect the thinking and feeling realms. When you separate those,
therapists get [students] as adult patients." On my visits to Waldorf
schools I felt as if I were watching sensory foundations being built in
each class, almost in layers.
Walking
into the kindergarten class at the San Francisco Waldorf School one
morning, I felt my stomach relax. The lights were dim, the colors soft
pastel. Intriguing materials for play were everywhere. The children had
organized them into a half dozen distinctly different fantasy worlds --
there was a make-believe woodshop in one corner; in another,
reminiscent of a farmhouse bedroom, two girls were putting a curiously
bland doll to bed in a cradle. This doll, I learned, is standard issue
in Waldorf kindergartens. It's the old-fashioned sort, simple stuffed
cotton, with almost no facial features. "The only thing an intelligent
child can do with a complete toy is take it apart," a kindergarten
teacher told me. "An incomplete toy lets children use their
imaginations." There were also wild hats and capes, pinecones and
driftwood, bowls of nuts and other items from the natural world. John
Bloom explained that the raw materials are meant not to celebrate
nature but to challenge children's spatial creativity.
Most
adults think it's cute when children imitate whatever they see. Waldorf
teachers take it seriously. Susan Kotansky, a kindergarten teacher at
the recently closed Westside Community School, in Manhattan, which used
the Waldorf methods for several years, said that at first her students
imitated superheroes they'd seen on television. In time, after they had
cooked with their teachers, worked with them on other projects, and
listened to fables and fairy tales with their moral lessons (a staple
in Waldorf primary grades), "their play changed and got more
purposeful." Learning through practical experience is a concept long
advocated by progressive education leaders, particularly the
turn-of-the-century reformer John Dewey. In recent years the idea has
been gaining popularity, though it is still rarely put into practice.
To
my surprise, young Waldorf children seemed to understand the principles
embedded in their exercises -- so well, in fact, that they could
comfortably explain Steiner's methodology themselves. At the original
U.S. Waldorf school, the Rudolf Steiner School, housed in two limestone
townhouses on Manhattan's Upper East Side, I fell into a provocative
discussion one morning with a dozen fourth-graders. The class was
finishing a year-long project: making mallets for wood carving out of
stubborn pieces of hardwood, which they were patiently filing and
sanding by hand. One boy, who had finished his mallet, was making a
knife out of teak, and regularly paused to feel its smoothness on his
cheek. Waldorf students work on some kind of art project virtually
every day. Recalling her early years, Eliana Raviv, a ten-year-old,
told me, "We never had green or purple. We make it out of vermilion,
red, yellow, and blue, two kinds of blue. It's important to get forms
out of your own painting. That way you learn how to develop forms."
Waldorf students aren't graded on their work until around the seventh
grade; Eliana's classmate, Maisie Weir, told me about a friend in a
traditional public school in Atlanta. "All they think about is tests,"
she said. "They don't even have recess anymore." In the early grades
students also do quite a bit of drawing with crayons -- not the
standard paraffin Crayolas but thick chunks of beeswax imported from
Germany. Beeswax that can be molded after warming in the hand is also
used to teach sculpting. There is an almost bland conformity to most
student artwork in the early grades -- an oddity that repels more than
a few parents. But the purpose is to build a foundation of technique.
Sure enough, in the work of older students one sees plenty of
refinement and individuality.
But
why learn an archaic art like wood carving moments before we enter the
twenty-first century? "You almost need it as a balance for the
high-tech world," Tove Elfstrom, the woodshop teacher at the Washington
Waldorf School, in Bethesda, Maryland, explained to me during my visit.
"So they can make something. To give them an innate sense of material."
Various studies have found that engagement with physical tasks -- those
requiring great dexterity but also surprisingly simple activities --
helps to build other skills, both intellectual and psychological. Or,
as Elfstrom put it, "Your finger sense develops your overall brain
capacity." Waldorf teachers believe that one of their primary jobs is
to help youngsters develop a strong will. To do that, they argue,
students must learn that the rewards they reap from an experience
require a commensurate amount of effort -- mental, physical, even
emotional. Many Waldorf loyalists lay the blame for some of the
troubles of today's youth on cultural forces that tilt the balance --
technology being chief among them. As Douglas Gerwin, a Waldorf high
school teacher, puts it, technology "promises an experience by which we
don't have to do anything to make it happen." This is why teachers
discourage younger students from watching television and don't
generally expose them to computers until the eighth grade or later. The
delay doesn't seem to do much harm. Peter Nitze, who graduated from the
Rudolf Steiner School, Harvard, and Stanford, is now a
global-operations director at AlliedSignal, which manufactures
aerospace and automotive products. At a recent open house at the
Steiner School, Nitze told the audience, "If you've had the experience
of binding a book, knitting a sock, playing a recorder, then you feel
that you can build a rocket ship -- or learn a software program you've
never touched. It's not a bravado, just a quiet confidence. There is
nothing you can't do. Why couldn't you? Why couldn't anybody?"
Emphasis
on the creative also guides the aspect of a Waldorf education that
probably frightens parents more than any other: the relaxed way that
children learn to read. Whereas students at more-competitive schools
are mastering texts in first grade, sometimes even in kindergarten,
most Waldorf students aren't reading fully until the third grade. And
if they're still struggling at that point, many Waldorf teachers don't
worry. In combination with another Waldorf oddity -- sending children
to first grade a year later than usual -- this means that students may
not be reading until age nine or ten, several years after many of their
peers. In earlier times the idea that children might come to reading
later, at their own pace, was considered appropriate. David Elkind, a
noted child psychologist at Tufts University, cites prodigious
evidence, particularly from other countries, that late readers
ultimately fare better at reading and other subjects than early
readers. A number of prominent figures, including Winston Churchill and
Albert Einstein, were very late readers. But in today's competitive
frenzy the drive in this country is to get children to learn as much as
they can, about reading or anything else, as early as possible.
It's
no surprise, then, that Waldorf parents occasionally panic. Others may
distrust Waldorf education because they have heard tales of parents who
pulled their children out of a Waldorf school in the third grade when
the kids still couldn't read. "That's like a standing joke," Toba
Winer, the mother of two graduates of the Rudolf Steiner School, told
me. "People say, 'Oh, can your kids read?' There was no concerted
effort to drum certain words into the kids. And that was the point."
Before teaching sound and word recognition, Waldorf teachers
concentrate on exercises to build up a child's love of language. The
technique seems to work, even in public schools. Barbara Warren, a
teacher at John Morse, a public school near Sacramento, says that two
years after Waldorf methods were introduced in her fourth-grade class
of mostly minority children, the number of students who read at grade
level doubled, rising from 45 to 85 percent. "I didn't start by making
them read more," Warren says. "I started telling stories, and getting
them to recite poetry that they learned by listening, not by reading.
They became incredible listeners." Many Waldorf parents recall that
their children were behind their friends in non-Waldorf schools but
somehow caught up in the third or fourth grade, and then suddenly read
with unusual fervor.
Still,
the system isn't fail-safe. Although Waldorf teachers learn techniques,
phonic and otherwise, that can pinpoint reading troubles, some have
such faith in the Waldorf way that they overlook children with real
disabilities -- a problem that school leaders consider the teacher's
failing, not the system's. Nonetheless, I spoke to several disgruntled
parents whose children were later found through outside testing to have
dyslexia or other reading difficulties. Such accounts obviously inflame
the worries of some reading experts; others are less concerned. Lucy
Calkins, a well-known reading specialist at the Teachers College of
Columbia University, says that in most public schools children who
start reading later tend to do worse, and Waldorf students might
benefit slightly from starting earlier. But, she says, "I would not
necessarily be worried in a Waldorf school. The foundation of literacy
is talk and play."
Music's Power
MUSIC
is as central as art in the Waldorf curriculum. Practice begins in
first grade, with recorders that are stored in cases the students knit
themselves; in fourth grade they each choose an orchestral instrument.
A typical Waldorf school offers several different music classes -- at
least one choir, an orchestra, and a jazz ensemble in which students
learn to improvise and sometimes make their instruments.
In
the past decade a half dozen scientific studies have supported the
notion that the study of music enriches a youngster's thinking
capacities. Some of those studies are tentative, but a few suggest
powerful associations. In one study, for example, Swiss and Austrian
researchers increased students' music lessons from one or two to five a
week while cutting back on math and language studies. After three years
the students were as good at math as students who had stuck with the
standard curriculum, and even better at languages. Researchers found
the music students to be more cooperative with one another as well.
What's
going on here? The answer may lie in a German study, by Gottfried
Schlaug, now at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston.
Schlaug determined through MRI scans that intense exposure to music
actually expands brain mass. Musicians he studied who had perfect pitch
also had an unusually large planum temporale in the left hemisphere of
the brain. When comparing nonmusicians with those who had started
playing music as young children, Schlaug found that the musicians also
had a larger mass of nerve fibers connecting the brain's two
hemispheres. The implications of this last finding are significant. A
person's creativity and analytical skills depend greatly on the ability
to think with both hemispheres of the brain; yet many of us lack this
agility.
Ambitious
as these assertions seem, I sometimes felt as if I were experiencing
their genesis myself in Waldorf's musical exercises. On one occasion,
when I joined a Waldorf teacher-training class, I started the day by
learning a complex singing round. As I struggled to keep up, I could
feel my thinking being pushed. The process exhausted and stretched me
in unfamiliar ways, and made me envious of Waldorf students. My envy
peaked one evening in New York City, at a parents' night for the
Steiner School. As part of a fundraiser, several faculty members had
arranged to sing cabaret songs; when they finished, some of the
eighth-graders, who were helping to serve food, decided that they would
sing something too. Moments later the adults sat transfixed as half a
dozen teenagers performed James Taylor's "That Lonesome Road" a
cappella, in slow, layered parts, with the polished harmony of a
professional chorus. "All I could think," Chris Huson, a banker and the
parent of a Waldorf second-grader told me later, "is that when my kids
grow up, I want them to be just like those guys."
This Is Math?
A
central objective of Waldorf teaching is to create a sense of wonder
about each subject, even math. Sixth-graders study geometric
progression by doing graphic-art projects. In San Francisco, I observed
second-graders studying arithmetic by creating concentric circles of
times tables and musing about their similarity to planetary patterns;
later they sang out complex multiplication drills while clapping and
hopping across an exercise room in syncopated rhythm -- a display of
mental and physical dexterity that would be beyond most adults. "Their
numbers are in their bodies," John Bloom, the school administrator,
explained.
A
standard exercise in Waldorf classes is a riveting game called "mental
math." One day at the Mathews School, when students were particularly
disruptive, Evelyn Arcuri, the teacher, clapped her hands and said,
"Okay, I'm thinking of a number." The students quickly turned quiet.
"If you add twelve," she said, "subtract twenty, multiply by nine, and
subtract six, the answer is thirty. What's the number?" Within moments
-- before I could recall the arithmetic steps of the exercise or even
the numbers -- several students were pumping their hands in the air,
promising answers, often the correct one. (The answer, by the way, is
twelve.) As students get older, the formulas get more complex and are
recited more quickly.
Beau
Leonhart, who has taught math for twenty-two years at the Marin
Academy, a non-Waldorf high school in California, and her husband,
James Shipman, also a long-time teacher at Marin, have found that
Waldorf graduates tend to exhibit unusually long attention spans.
Shipman says, "Waldorf kids aren't the ones out the door when the bell
rings. They're the ones who tend to linger, who want to carry on a
conversation. If anything, they're a little slower, because they're
thinking about it." Leonhart adds, "If they can't do it one way,
they'll go at it from another angle." Shipman, who teaches aikido,
among other subjects, told me, "In thirteen years I've had two black
belts, both Waldorf kids. They know the meaning of focus and
discipline. They have a depth, there's no way around it. They're very
present." It may be no coincidence that Waldorf schools concentrate on
building athletic foundations in children's early years -- balance,
coordination, agility -- before introducing competitive sports in the
upper grades. It seems to pay off. School news clips are full of
accounts of victories over teams from schools two or three times their
size.
Waldorf
students' capacity for concentration may be stimulated by an
old-fashioned but increasingly rare practice: allowing time for
reflection. Science classes are an example. In the average school,
teachers introduce a concept first and then do a demonstration or an
experiment to illustrate it. "It takes the kid out of it," Mikko
Bojarsky, the science teacher at the Sacramento Waldorf School, told
me. Waldorf teachers turn this process around, doing an experiment
before giving the concept much discussion. "Then you let it go to bed
for the night," Bojarsky said. "They literally sleep on it. A lot
happens in their sleep life." The next day, he said, students generally
come in with many more questions than they had the day of the
experiment, often including some the teacher never considered.
"Nowadays we always push people to think so fast, instead of letting
them reflect," Bojarsky continued. The process institutionalizes an
important principle that evades many a teacher -- to let students
struggle toward their answers and individual understanding. "One of the
things I had to learn," Bojarsky said, "was to not answer their
questions, especially in the twelfth grade. If you give them answers,
they'll just shut down. It's amazing what they'll come up with if you
wait long enough."
A Sense of Ethics
EACH
morning when Waldorf students in the elementary grades first get to
class, they find their teacher standing in the doorway, waiting to look
them in the eye and shake their hands. "You can tell so much by how
they shake hands, who's a little off," Lynda Smith, at the time a San
Francisco teacher, told me. Moments later, after the students have
taken their seats, they rise for another Waldorf tradition: recitation
of the morning verse.
This
is a short poem, written by Steiner, that aims to inspire students
about nature and good work. (The verse for the first through fourth
grades, for example, says in part, "I revere, Oh God, the strength of
humankind, which Thou so graciously has planted in my soul, that I with
all my might, may love to work and learn.") When possible, classes may
go for a walk to recite these verses on a riverbank in Sacramento, say,
or in New York's Central Park. Cloying as this ritual may seem, many
graduates remember the verses fondly. One admits that he still says his
morning verse while shaving.
The
solemnity of the verses sets the tone for the morning "main lesson," an
intense two-hour class. (Coincidentally, carving out large blocks of
study time like this has become a popular reform today.) Teachers are
supposed to avoid reading from books when presenting their lesson
material, and to prepare original oral presentations virtually every
day. The emphasis placed on these presentations occasionally fills
class time with more droning lectures than engaging student projects --
a borrowing from traditional education's more oppressive side. But
there are other features that can make classes lively. Teachers are
taught to present lessons as topics for open discussion, and to create
a dramatic atmosphere in which the moral principles involved in a given
subject can be not only pondered but felt. First-graders, for example,
will pretend that they are gnomes in a fairy tale that poses concepts
of good and evil. Fourth-graders may act out Nordic myths, fiercely
stomping their way through a poem's iambic and dactylic rhythms. The
poems also talk about Norse gods who symbolize pride, loss of
innocence, and the power of the intellect -- issues that Waldorf
teachers believe are just beginning to dawn on fourth-graders.
Waldorf's
assorted lessons in goodness (the schools also ask students to do
regular community service) seem to have their effect. "A lot of
optimists come out of here," says Damon Saykally, a recent Sacramento
Waldorf senior who entered the program as a sophomore and describes
himself as a nihilist. "When I first came here, I was shocked at how
much they think they can help the world. I think it's great."
Waldorf's
philosophy of teaching through living out stories may be unusual, but
it comes out of a long tradition, from the folkways of ancient cultures
to the modern-day theories of child psychologists such as Bruno
Bettelheim and Robert Coles. In his well-known books on the development
of a moral and spiritual intelligence in children, Coles stresses an
immersion in moral stories. Waldorf teachers go even further. They
believe that when students go through school without such stories,
their ability to develop a sense of empathy is inhibited, and that
limits their capacity to find meaning in life. Pointing to the
psychologist Jean Piaget's famous theories about a youngster's gradual
stages of development, Waldorf teachers argue that traditional schools
aggravate this problem by imposing intellectual demands on students
before they're ready for them. This only discourages youngsters, they
say, leaving them prone to become unfeeling but clever cynics or,
worse, simply apathetic.
One
big plank in Waldorf's platform that is a bit difficult to get a grip
on is the exhaustive references to the "soul." The word comes up,
Saykally told me, "all the time." ("Soul" occurs no fewer than four
times in the nineteen lines of the upper-school morning verse.) I was
perplexed by the ubiquity of this term and by the apparent lack of
discussion of its meaning, so I began asking students what it meant to
them. "Regardless of what you do, it's who you are," a San Francisco
eighth-grader said. "What you believe and think," one of her classmates
said. "How you act with that in the world," another said. Pretty good
answers, I thought. An hour or so later David Weber, the head teacher
of their school, abruptly pulled me aside. "Don't interview them about
that!" he said. "They're not at that level yet. It's too analytical.
That's for the eleventh grade. Now they're just feeling it. It's just
an experience. That's where it should stay." Later, when he had cooled
down, Weber explained his concern more fully: questions from a reporter
might encourage eighth-graders' tendency to be judgmental, a trait that
Waldorf teachers try hard to temper. "How healthy is it for children to
make judgments at this age?" he asked me. Eighth-graders want to see
everything as "black and white," he said. "It's cool or it sucks. Some
never get beyond that. We're trying not to dignify this kind of
self-absorbed judgment."
Though
aspects of Weber's goal sound laudable in theory, they can prove
elusive in practice. During my visits I saw many seventh- and
eighth-graders roll their eyes at various exercises meant to feed the
soul (a puppet show of a fairy tale in a school assembly; the
relentless morning verses; and, once, a seventh-grade science lesson
wrapped in a fable, in which a king ordered an alchemist to get the
dirt out of his salt). When I asked students about these exercises, I
got mixed but mostly respectful reactions. Some outsiders, however, are
considerably more distrustful, having sensed a huge piece of Waldorf
philosophy that teachers keep largely hidden from their students.
Covert Spirituality
IN
early 1998 Dan Dugan, a disenchanted Waldorf parent in San Francisco,
sued the Sacramento school district and another nearby for introducing
the Waldorf philosophy in two public schools in the mid-1990s. Dugan
argued that the movement has a secret agenda that violates the
Constitution's First and Fourteenth Amendments: the indoctrination of
children into Waldorf's "religious doctrines of anthroposophy."
Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to his theories about the
evolution of human consciousness, drawn from a multiplicity of
disciplines -- anthropology, philosophy, psychology, science, and
various religions, particularly Christianity. As Steiner wove these
disciplines together with his own research, he created his own brand of
spirituality, some of which complements the New Age movement. A number
of Steiner's beliefs are now somewhat accepted -- for example, the
notion that virtually all fields of study, from the humanities to the
sciences, share a foundation of explanation. Yet many of his theories
remain suspect -- in large part, no doubt, because of the dreamy way in
which Steiner expressed them. In a typical essay, "The Roots of
Education," he argued, "If you observe man's development with the means
of inner vision of which I have already spoken -- with the eyes and
ears of the soul -- then you will see that man does not consist only of
a physical body . . . but that he also has supersensible members of his
being."
These
notions make Dugan, who is a sound engineer, smile and shake his head.
"I'm opposed to magical thinking; I'm a secular humanist," he told me
as we chatted recently in an office stuffed with electronic equipment
on one side and dozens of anthroposophy books on the other, all of
which he claims to have read. In Dugan's view, Steiner's theories are
simply "cult pseudo-science." After Waldorf began spreading into public
school classrooms, Dugan formed a group called PLANS (People for Legal
and Non-Sectarian Schools) to declare what he calmly calls
"epistemological warfare." His goal, he says, is to sort out two
questions: "What is reliable knowledge? How is it obtained?"
Waldorf
teachers counter that they don't formally teach anthroposophy. This is
true; in fact, their own rules prohibit them from doing so. They do
study it, however -- most intensively at the Steiner College, where
virtually every class text was written by Steiner or another
anthroposophist. (The Steiner College does expect student teachers to
come to it with standard bachelor's degrees.) Waldorf teachers say they
hide anthroposophy not because they see anything evil or dangerous in
it but because they don't want to push their philosophy onto the
students. The purpose of the teachers' anthroposophical studies is to
enliven their own sensibility and deepen their understanding of
evolution. Only then, according to Waldorf theory, can they inspire
students with the wonder and curiosity that make for profound learning.
Steiner himself encouraged this distinction. "If I had my way," he
wrote,
I
would give anthroposophy a new name every day to prevent people from
hanging on to its literal meaning.... We must never be tempted to
implement sectarian ideas.. . . We must not chain children's minds to
finished concepts, but give them concepts capable of further growth and
expansion.
Steinerian
pronouncements of this sort have excited legions of Waldorf teachers.
Ruth Mikkelsen, of the Mathews School, noticed this when she first
observed Waldorf classes. "Why do they think these kids are so
special?" she remembers wondering. "Thousands of times I've sat with
teachers and heard them say, 'I want to kill Johnny,' or 'I can't wait
till I get home and can have a glass of wine.' At Waldorf they say,
'How can we help little Ronnie, who's, you know, killing puppies now?'"
That attitude may be precisely the point. Jerome Kagan, a developmental
psychologist at Harvard, says, "In most of the curriculum changes
schools make, if there's any benevolent effect on students, it's
because the teacher is now motivated and passionate. And kids benefit
from that, not from the curriculum."
But
anthroposophy still "leaks into the curriculum," as Dan Dugan puts it.
"They try to hide it, but they can't," Rebecca Bolnick, a recent
graduate of the Sacramento Waldorf School, told me. Take, for example,
Steiner's belief that each child's temperament matches one of the four
medieval types: choleric (bold), phlegmatic (deliberate), melancholic
(brooding), or sanguine (lighthearted). Steiner also believed that
physical and spiritual development fall into distinct seven-year
periods, the first beginning with the arrival of a child's permanent
teeth.
Suspect
as these ideas may seem, the outside experts I spoke to consider them
relatively innocent. ("When you think of what the learning-disability
people cook up, this is very mild," a prominent expert on early
education told me.) Harmless or not, zealotry in the practice of
Steiner's theories usually has a much simpler cause: bad teachers.
Although this problem afflicts every school, Waldorf wrestles with an
extra challenge by being one of the last refuges for the
countercultural values of the 1960s. "A lot of people think Waldorf
schools are the place for the kids of ex-hippies," says Eugene
Schwartz, the director of teacher training at Sunbridge College, in
Spring Valley, New York. That image often attracts teachers who are
"dropping out from the world of competition or power," Schwartz says.
They can find great comfort in Steiner's spirituality, and become more
devoted followers than even Steiner himself might have wished. The
result is that students sometimes learn more about Steiner's scientific
theories than about Isaac Newton's. "People often think Waldorf offers
an easy way to teach the sciences," Schwartz says. "In fact it's just
the opposite."
As
public school officials collaborate with Waldorf leaders (who come to
public schools by invitation only), they are working out some
interesting armistices in response to their critics' epistemological
warfare. There is no uniform system as yet, and given the diverse
interests of the nation's school districts, there may never be one.
Some schools follow Waldorf's practice of using the Old Testament in
the early grades, in world-literature studies and for inspiration on
student projects; others avoid it. Most adopt Waldorf's accelerated
approach to basic arithmetic and some form of its relatively slow,
layered approach to reading. The initiatives show intriguing signs of
success, particularly with underachieving minorities. For instance,
although reading scores are often low in the early years, they
generally rise dramatically by eighth grade. But the partnerships have
also presented challenges. The Waldorf pedagogy and class readings are
heavily Eurocentric; public school teachers must modify this
orientation to accommodate American literature and, increasingly,
multicultural points of view. (In California, for example, white
students may be inspired by gardening, but Hispanics generally aren't.)
And dramatic change in schools never proceeds smoothly. When teachers
are asked to try, as adults, learning to sing, play music, and paint,
many suddenly find their old ways quite attractive. As for any broad
troubles with religious indoctrination, the classes in public Waldorf
schools have been pretty well stripped of explorations of the
spiritual.
The Second Mother
ONE
of the unusual aspects of Waldorf education is a system called looping,
whereby a homeroom teacher stays with a class for more than a year --
in Waldorf's case, from first through eighth grade. The practice has an
intriguing combination of pros and cons, and is attracting growing
attention in other education circles both private and public.
Although
Waldorf students work with other teachers each day in subjects such as
music, foreign languages, and physical education, the main lessons are
taught for eight years by the same teacher. The purpose of this is to
build solid, long-term relationships and to teach students how to do
that themselves. "If you get in an argument with someone, you have to
work it out," says Karen Rivers, a Waldorf educator and consultant in
California. (This is a fair point of pride -- by all accounts Waldorf
teachers do spend considerable amounts of time talking with students
and their parents.) For students, looping offers a base of support. "I
can't tell you how wonderful it is to have a second mom," Ivi Esguerra,
a recent graduate, told the audience at the Steiner School open house.
"The caring went beyond the academics."
The
downside of looping, however, is substantial. Although the task of
preparing new lessons each day keeps material fresh for the teachers
and students, it also restricts the teacher's ability to perfect given
lessons with repetition. And conflict between teachers and students
isn't always overcome; even when it is, tension can remain. "Our
teacher was great," Ben Klocek, the recent Sacramento senior, told me.
"But it was way too much. By the eighth grade you're completely sick of
each other." Perhaps most important, the holes in a given instructor's
teaching aren't always readily filled later. Scott Embrey-Stine, a
Waldorf high school teacher in Sacramento, has spent most of his career
in public schools, and has been impressed by the rare skills that
Waldorf develops in students. Still, after two years at Waldorf, he
says, he could identify the strengths and weaknesses in the
lower-school teachers by the distinct character of each class. "You see
the imprint of the class teacher," he says.
A Different Citizen
IN
the end the measure of a school lies in the graduates it produces. The
Waldorf record seems pretty impressive. Consider students' scores on
the Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Despite Waldorf students' unfamiliarity
with standardized tests, their SAT scores have generally come in well
above the national average, particularly on verbal measures. "The
concepts, they've got," Kathleen O'Connor, who is the college counselor
at the Washington Waldorf School, told me. "When they get direction on
how to take multiple-choice tests, their scores soar." More important,
considering the limited extent to which SATs measure ability, Waldorf
students seem to do well in college admissions. Graduates from the New
York and Washington schools are enrolled at many of the country's top
private colleges, including Amherst, Stanford, Princeton, Swarthmore,
Wellesley, and Yale.
Waldorf
graduates have never been carefully tracked in this country; the only
longitudinal study is a German survey, published in 1981, in which
three independent researchers looked at 1,460 Waldorf graduates. They
found that 22 percent had passed a rigorous German achievement test --
triple the rate for state-school students. Evidence here in the United
States is anecdotal but encouraging. College professors who have had
Waldorf graduates as students have been impressed with their humble
confidence, passion for learning, and intellectual resourcefulness. And
alumni rosters are replete with professional acclaim in fields as
varied as industry and the arts, medicine and the military.
Still,
a persistent fear about Waldorf schools is that their noncompetitive
approach doesn't prepare students to fit in and succeed in a
dog-eat-dog world -- a criticism that some Waldorf leaders acknowledge
is sometimes justified. Indeed, many students choose demanding schools
after leaving Waldorf precisely because they, or their parents, want
more pressure and rigor in their lives. Karen Rivers, who talks
frequently to worried parents in her role as a Waldorf consultant,
thinks many miss the point. "We're not trying to teach them to fit in,"
she told me. "They already know how to fit in. We're trying to educate
them to create a better world." But what about those who don't change
the world -- who, like most people, don't even rise to the top? At a
Steiner School alumni gathering in New York, Deborah Grace Winer, now a
freelance writer, recalled that her mother always told her, "Life is
not a horse race." Because someone will always beat you? I asked.
"Yes," she answered. "And when someone does finally beat you, you have
nothing."
Winer's
comment reminded me of my visit to the Mathews School for juvenile
offenders, where students begin each day already behind, with little of
the foundation that Winer now has. A feel for music is but one example.
"Our kids have no sense of rhythm," Evelyn Arcuri told me. As the
students master a musical instrument, teachers say, their sense of
rhythm grows. This seems to provide an anchor that strengthens their
confidence in other work. "The recorders are just excellent," Thomas,
the outgoing seventeen-year-old, told me. "It calms you down, helps you
think better." Thomas was kicked out of his previous school for getting
in fights. Now his grandmother says, "He's different when he's in that
school. He doesn't come home as frustrated as he did." As I watched
several students practice playing their recorders one morning, I
understood what Thomas's grandmother meant. When the students hit a
difficult section, some gave up, and a few stomped out of the room.
Most soon returned. "I screwed up too," the teacher told them, "but I
don't let that stop me. Just play through. Persevere. That's what this
is about." They tried again and then again, did better, smiled.
Copyright � 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company.
Todd Oppenheimer lives in San Francisco. He is the author of
"The Computer Delusion," The Atlantic's cover article for July, 1997,
which won a National Magazine Award for public-interest reporting. His
latest book, highly recommended, is "The Flickering Mind".
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