Waldorf
was something I’d never written about at Smarter Parenting, the website I run
as part of my day job. We had a couple of articles on the Montessori
system and I’d written a piece on the democratic
classroom. But I thought we needed something on the Waldorf education
system to round things off. And so I began to research the topic, putting out
feelers to speak with teachers and administrators in the Waldorf system.
I
reached out to a friend whose wife was a retired educator. She’d taught in a
Waldorf school the last five years of her teaching career. I also placed a
query at HARO (Help a Reporter
Out), where journalists can query other members and set up interviews or get
quotes from experts on any topic imaginable for articles they are writing.
Sometimes
I get deluged by HARO responses in response to a query, other times, I get nothing. So instead of
sitting back and waiting to pick someone else’s brains, I hedged my bets and
began to do some independent research on the net.
Now, I’d
always known there was something strange, even off about the Waldorf classroom. Some aura of cultishness, perhaps
even Nazism, clung to Waldorf like an unpleasant department store perfume
sample that won’t be washed away with soap and water. I knew that the system
was based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who seemed, to put it frankly, a
bit of a crackpot.
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| Rudolf Steiner |
My impression of the Waldorf was that the schools wanted to distance themselves from Steiner, to make a distinction between Steiner’s beliefs and the schools that were spawned from them. But the more I dug into the subject of Waldorf schools, the weirder things got. It was worse than I’d thought. And no one from a Waldorf school seemed to want to go on record. I had one publicist contact me to say that she knew of a parent of a child in a Waldorf school and this parent was willing to pass on my questions to the administrator of the school.
This
seemed a strange way to conduct business, like buying a watch from a guy in a trench
coat in a back alley. I asked, “Can’t you just put me in touch with the
administrator?”
The
publicist replied only that she was sorry it had to be this way, but that she
would eliminate the middle man by giving my questions directly to the administrator.
With
nothing to lose, I sent on my questions, but never heard back. Follow-up
messages to the publicist went unanswered.
I
had thought my questions fairly innocuous. They weren’t confrontational. Were
the Waldorf people just sniffing around to see whether I planned a hit piece? (And
is there any other school system out there that has need to worry about hit
pieces??)
What
was with these people? What was with Waldorf??
My
friend’s wife, the one who’d taught in the Waldorf system, also failed to
respond to my questions. I went back to her husband. He said, “Oh, she never
reads her email. I’ll tell her to take a look.”
But I
never did hear back from her.
Which
seems strange to me: why agree to be interviewed and then never check your
email?
Does
this say something about Waldorf or only about this woman’s email habits?
I don’t
know.
But as I
looked into Waldorf on my own, I found some really strange things about their
philosophy. There were parents who’d had really bad experiences with Waldorf.
And one name kept coming up: Dan Dugan.
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| Dan Dugan |
Dugan is a cofounder of PLANS (People for Legal and Nonsectarian Schools), an organization that was formed to educate the public about Waldorf education. PLANS has been doing just that since 1997, acting as a clearinghouse for information on the mysterious Waldorf school system. I went to the contact page at PLANS, and sent off an email to Dan Dugan, who, as it turns out, was happy to speak with me, and gracious enough to respond in writing, at length, to the ten questions I sent him.
I needed
to give my readers a rounded picture of Waldorf. So my questions to Dan ran the
gamut. But what interested me most about Waldorf on a personal level, was the
Nazi question. I had read that while Hitler was bent on closing down all
Waldorf schools, and eventually succeeded, Rudolf Hess managed to stall him for
a long time. I wanted to know why Hitler was against Waldorf, while Hess was
all for Steiner’s educational philosophy, known as “Anthroposophy.”
Dan explained
that Hitler didn’t like Steiner because Steiner was a cult figure with a significant
following. That made Steiner the competition: Hitler didn’t want anyone to follow
anyone but Hitler.
But Waldorf
educators didn’t understand that Hitler saw Waldorf as a competitor. They hoped
to persuade the Reich that their
philosophy was in line with Nazi philosophy. So Waldorf fired all the Jewish
teachers and wrote
to the authorities that their program was now a perfect fit for the new
regime.
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| The day after Kristallnacht |
While this gambit didn’t succeed, it did put off the inevitable for about six years, until Hess fled to England. That’s when Hitler cracked down on occultism, outlawed Anthroposophy, and closed all the schools. For further information, Dan referred me to “Education for the National Community? Waldorf Schools in the Third Reich,” a fascinating chapter from a book by Peter Staudenmaier that shows how Waldorf tried to adapt to a changing political climate during WWII. The chapter begins:
On the 31st of January 1933, the day after Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany, a Mrs. Oberstein removed her daughter from the
Breslau Waldorf school. Oberstein, a Nazi party member, was upset by the
presence of a temporary assistant teacher from a Jewish background, and
expressed her strong disagreement with the Waldorf faculty regarding “the race
question.” Her daughter’s regular teacher, Heinrich Wollborn, wrote a letter
the same day defending his Jewish colleague and explaining the Waldorf attitude
toward such matters:
“We teachers place our complete trust in the capacity of
every person for spiritual transformation, and we are firmly convinced that
anthroposophy provides the possibility for an individual to outgrow his racial
origin.”
So there
you have it: the philosophy behind Waldorf sees Jewishness as an inborn flaw.
It can be “outgrown” to be sure. But in the view of Steiner and Anthroposophy,
to be Jewish is to have a racial birth defect. Staudenmaier writes:
The visiting teacher whose presence had sparked the incident,
an anthroposophist named Ernst Lehrs, came from a family whose Jewish roots
were notably tenuous. Not only was Lehrs himself fervently committed to
Steiner’s esoteric version of Christianity, both his parents and his
grandparents belonged to the Protestant church. The family had not been Jewish
for generations, except in the ‘racial’ sense, and Lehrs exemplified the
anthroposophical ideal of spiritual transformation and transcending one’s
racial origins—the abandonment of Jewishness as the sine qua non for
individuals from Jewish backgrounds hoping to become full members of the German
Volk. In anthroposophist eyes, Lehrs
had successfully joined the national community, whereas in Nazi eyes he was
ineligible to do so.
The
response by the Nazi regime to Wollborn’s initial letter was lukewarm. That's because Hitler
didn’t see Judaism as a birth defect, or something that can be outgrown or overcome. Hitler saw Judaism as an infestation of vermin that must be eradicated and shown no mercy. And so it
was that Wollborn and the other faculty members thought better of that initial policy
position and began again:
Writing to local school authorities in October 1933, Wollborn
reversed his earlier standpoint, insisting that in his January 31 letter
“nothing was further from my mind than taking a principled position on the race
question. I therefore greatly regret formulating the letter in such an unclear
manner.” Noting that he wrote the earlier letter when the Nazi government was
still forming, Wollborn now declared: “I have placed my pedagogical work
entirely on the basis of the government, and have fully expressed this by
joining the National Socialist Teachers League in June of this year.”
The Breslau Waldorf school, meanwhile, explained that Jews no
longer worked there and that Lehrs had been only a temporary employee who left
the school before the new laws regarding Jewish employees were promulgated. The
school further noted that many Waldorf teachers had joined the Nazi teachers’
association and that all Waldorf schools in Germany had completed the process
of Gleichschaltung, the Nazi term for
bringing social institutions into line with the regime.
A local school inspector assigned to investigate the incident
completely absolved both Wollborn and the school. His final report confirmed
the Waldorf representatives’ claims and declared that the Breslau Waldorf
school was indeed free of “Jewish influence,”
observing moreover that a number of its core faculty were Nazi party members.
There is
much more to the story of Waldorf’s desperate and hopeless bid to be accepted
by the Nazi regime. The Staudenmaier coverage of this chapter in the history of
Waldorf, is impressive and deserves to be read in full. But the main takeaways
are 1) In Rudolf Steiner’s view, Judaism is a racial defect and 2) During WWII, Jewish
teachers were fired to make Waldorf acceptable to Hitler (though the
gambit failed).
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| Auschwitz |
Knowing the history, these facts, it is difficult to imagine that any Jewish parent would consider enrolling a child in the Waldorf school system. One might argue that the Waldorf of today is far from these early underpinnings—that the administrators acted under duress. But having read the record, we now have a keen awareness of the inherent antisemitism of Steiner, his theory of Anthroposophy, and the Waldorf school system. Who then could embrace the system that betrayed us—and sees our Jewish birthright as a defect?
