Waldorf schools – Rudolf Steiner and I

I did my Abitur at a Waldorf school. At that time we had T-shirts printed after the exams: the portrait of Rudolf Steiners was emblazoned in the front and stood on the back: “The only true one was Steiner-Abi 2021”. We found it funny. Just like the well -known saying: “Folding hands, lower brains and think of Rudolf Steiner.” He was always jokingly said and we did not even notice that we did exactly that every day. Because before the start of the lesson, we had to recite the so -called morning saying, which is a prayer of Steiner’s feather on closer inspection. And that describes my relationship as a Waldorf student to my schoolist very well: somehow Steiner was always present and at the same time he was pretty concealed from us children.

I knew that a portrait of him hung in the teacher room, more precisely, in the conference room. The few times that I was there felt like I had entered a sacred space, only that instead of a cross a framed Dr. Steiner hung on the wall and looked down on you. I cannot say how the college felt in this room, but in the school hours I could feel a kind of dedication to Steiner’s ideas for many teachers. Not that they had specifically talked about him. This was not necessary to convey the seriousness with which they met Steiner’s work as a child. In 2013, over 80 percent of Waldor teachers stated in a surveythat anthroposophy is of great to very very important importance for their professional activity.

Even of the teachers who sometimes called him the “Ollen Rudi”, I never actually heard anything critical.

It feels realistic for me. Many lived anthroposophy at my school. Have dressed, talked, fed and designed their everyday life accordingly. It is respect that “real anthros” found out within the school community that I was memorized. I saw some of them almost every day for thirteen years. And even of the teachers who sometimes called him the “Ollen Rudi”, I never actually heard anything critical. They didn’t always find everything well and right, but their attitude from Steiner was essentially shaped by respect and honors.

Waldorf schools attach great importance to the fact that anthroposophy is not taught as a subject. At the same time, the curriculum is built through and through anthroposophical assumptions and logics. Every day begins with the “morning saying”, the esoteric form of movement eurythmy is compulsory for twelve years and the classrooms are painted in given colors. In addition, there is a religion -called religion, which is characterized by anthroposophically, partly including worship and so -called confirmation. It was only in the twelfth grade that we had finally managed to convince the “Oberanthro” at our school to explain a few basics in religious education.

So I thought I knew Rudolf Steiner – after all, I grew up with him. However, I hadn’t read anything from him apart from a few pleasing quotations, which is the one Total edition With over three thousand lectures, published in 354 volumes, now freely accessible online. To be honest, I was very overwhelmed when I started reading it. These are such masses of statements, some of which also contradict themselves that it is difficult to get an overview. Steiner’s cumbersome language does not exactly help.

The most shocking statements were so badly racistthat I don’t want to reproduce them here, but they are easy to find online. They questioned everything for me. I fell even further from faith when I read more about the “truths” that Steiner “looked”. His version of human history always sounds like a fantasy novel for me: »In the past, people were able to absorb the food from the immediate vicinity, just as the lungs take up the air today. At that time man was connected by suction threads associated with all the nature surrounding him (…). That was the old diet on earth. «There are tons of such fantasies: gnome that form from gravity; A heart that is not a pump to our genitals that will fall off in the future when the larynx becomes a reproductive body. And in almost six thousand years, the apocalyptic “war of all against everyone”, which will only survive a little “pile” spiritually prepared people. When I read, I always fluctuated between complete fascination with abstruse and desperate laugh. Did my biology teacher believe that? Or my history teacher? And if not? Then why did you trust Steiner’s pedagogy?

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In any case, despite the Abitur, I cannot reliably distinguish which part of my general education corresponds to the state of science and what Steiner’s clairvoyance is due. Stupid for me, but that was exactly how it was thought. In January 1923, Steiner explained in a teacher conference: »The consciousness in the children would have to cause them to be given the objective truth. And if these sometimes look anthroposophically, anthroposophy is not to blame. ”At the same time, Steiner is only too happy to defame real scientists. Sometimes rather cute, for example when he described it as a “moon calf” and sometimes hard as a “miscarriage”. Only when the knowledge is artistic form would a scientist become a “full man,” he said. I knew that we did not trust Waldis, “materialistic science”, that was also perceptible in class, but I hadn’t expected so much clenched anti -science.

What surprised me less was that this doctor makes philosophy so clear differences between materialistic and spiritual people. As a Waldorf student, I always had the feeling that we were not only “the good”, but also “the better”. Probably a clear case of spiritual arrogance. But when I read how Steiner completely deployed humanity from a first grader, I was shocked: “These are these cases that are increasingly occurring that children are born (…) who are actually not people in relation to the highest ego, but that are filled with (…) of a kind of natural demon. (…) You can’t build a demon school. ”I don’t know whether this girl had to leave the Waldorf school. In general, Steiner, who smiled from the wall with us in the teacher conference room, said quite a lot of pejorative things about the children of his school. Here is a small selection: “Mental earthworm”, “pronounced criminal crime”, “psychopath children”, “on a level of calf thinking”, “hideous”, “stupid”, “Bolshevist”, “Krüppelkind”, “to a large extent morally spoiled”, “very stupid” …

So the more I read, the more my awe crumbled before the worshiped “Mr. Doctor” of my childhood. And the confidence in my Waldorf school formation was crumbling. My Abitur is not the result of solid and well-founded school education, but the result of selective binge learning for the external exams. And so today I see Steiner as a dilettant “Galaxy Brain”, who simply did not know any professional borders and, without real expertise, developed pedagogy, “medicine”, agriculture and a social order, where his followers still work through.