Waldorf Schools Are Quirky, Culty and Just the School for Young Keith Raniere

My son went to a Waldorf kindergarten and the teachers told him that gnomes and fairies were real. This was the least of our problems.

I did not mind at all that my son’s Waldorf school wanted to instill in him a sense of spirituality. What I minded was that the teachers sought to supplant parents. They made decisions about my child’s education without consulting me or listening to my concerns. They outright lied to us, telling me that he had a great day when he had a tantrum at drop-off which my partner observed. I later learned that Steiner instructed teachers to lie to parents. It’s in his lectures. Parents were not allowed in the classroom not even to help our child hang up his coat. Even during a birthday celebration when some parents were invited because the teacher needed help, I was not allowed to stay for the birthday celebration. Our child was not allowed to bring any of his artwork home or show it to us at pick up.

Waldorf is teacher led and this is the opposite of child centered which is what they advertise themselves as. In Steiner’s lectures he said a young child should obey his teacher without question. The grades also spend a lot of time sitting in desks listening to the teacher.

They also said the school was nature based and they would have circle time outside. Circle time was inside, so the handbook we were asked to read was simply lies. They did go on daily hikes but if they didn’t stay in line the teacher punished them (this was kindergarten).

Waldorf has art but not creativity. Children are told what to draw and they all must draw the same thing.

This is not the alternative school that was advertised. It is a school from the dark ages where teachers are not credentialed and have absolutely no training in classroom management. Before pulling my son out I observed fourth graders throwing rocks at each other in front of the teacher, during a class activity, and the teacher did nothing.

Waldorf has no differentiation. All instruction is delivered to the whole class. This would be bad enough but not only do they not allow gifted children to progress, they discourage gifted children, make them feel wrong for being curious, and try to hobble them because they think intelligence is a sign of the demon and they want to shepherd the child’s soul away from the demon.

The school was very disorganized and dishonest. The way the teachers and administration treated me was abusive and dismissive. The way the teacher treated my son sucked the joy out of him.

Some of these problems may not exist in all Waldorf schools but I will never take another chance on a school that calls itself Waldorf.

I actually have my own criticisms of Steiner and think he went wrong in numerous areas. But the author of this article manages to lie, distort truth, and openly express their own hateful bigotry while trying to construct an argument against Steiner.

Steiner said that the heart is not merely a pump, his particular lecture on that subject was merely aiming to have the audience think of the heart in a new way. It still could be described as a pump in the material sense, but it is also more than that. One is being lazy to claim that Steiner was saying that the heart cannot be described as a pump. It would be good if the author provided references so that people can see for themselves rather than just take the author’s word at face value. This is actually my criticism of Steiner, there is too much that he claimed based on so-called “clairvoyance”. Ironically, the author is repeating the very method of Steiner by making claims that she just expects the audience to accept in order to follow her larger argument.

Then the author openly displays hatred and bigotry of men by claiming that men like Steiner are some kind of common occurrence. Steiner was literally living in the same time as Helena Blavatsky, a woman who made very similar claims about knowing how to organize society for the better, without technical training. Anyone not blinded by hatred would understand that both Steiner and Blavatsky are quite unusual, regardless of whether one likes or dislikes them. They are far from being representative of either men or women. The author can only be speaking out of irrational hatred when writing things like “There is a man (it almost always is a male authority figure) who was supposedly one of the world’s smartest men and top problem solvers….” How can anyone say “almost always” when these kinds of men are rare occurrences, and when there are multiple examples of similar women? Not without obvious irrational hate.

It is true that Waldorf schools are not honest about Steiner, on that we agree, Otherwise, the article is quite dishonest in its thesis. Articles like this only support the Waldorf movement because they are obviously irrational and only serve to make Steiner followers feel misunderstood.

Rudolf Steiner is genuinely not easy to grasp. Taking some of his obscure sayings out of context is a very cheap form of attack. If you want just one book to get some idea of the scale of his approach, look at “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”: https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/AP1947/GA010_index.html
Read this carefully, let it sink in, and you will find an extremely balanced, ethical, systematic, scientific and rational approach to spiritual investigation. If you thought that “chakras”, reincarnation and the like were the property of Eastern religions, you will actually find that the very best and clearest explanations of these phenomena were given in West, within the tradition of Grail Christianity.

I’ve got a good friend whose father was a priest in the Christian Community, the church founded on Steiner principles. As a kid, she used to tease her parents: “Steiner says do this! Steiner says do that!” — implying that they would hop and jump and do anything the great master said. And it’s true of many Steiner followers.

In all the reading and research I’ve done on Steiner, however, I can only find one genuine mistake that he made. He obviously thought he was going to live longer than he did; and he died with much of his work incomplete. This is the cause of much of the rigid thinking you find in the Steiner movement — people are taking what were just his bare indications about a subject, and making them into great pillars of truth.

As to why he died early: there is still a huge argument as to whether he was poisoned or not. There’s no doubt that sheer overwork and the trauma of seeing his wooden Goetheanum centre burned down (it had a dome bigger than St Peter’s) contributed to his death.

If you really want to understand the genius of Steiner, I can highly recommend a series of lectures he gave in 1922 called World Economy: https://wn.rsarchive.org/SocialIssues/GA340/English/RSP1972/WldEco_index.html

This is the most brilliant treatment of economics I’ve ever read, clearly and simply explained, and it describes the problems of globalization that only hit the world decades later. This work completely shreds Marxism, for one thing. In order to fix the mess in this world, we need clear concepts above all, and Steiner was highly concerned that working class people had access to correct concepts, instead of the muddled Marxist claptrap that still rattles in many heads.

And if you really want to understand Waldorf schools, read Steiner’s Soul Economy lectures. You’ll find the least dogmatic approach to education you can imagine. All he really does is describe what is happening with children at particular ages, and provide the best indications for dealing with these different phases. I can tell you flatly, as an experienced teacher and teacher trainer, that I’ve never found more useful or practical guidelines in teaching than these.

Above all — again and again — Steiner states that allowing the free development of each child’s capabilities is the aim. I’ve taught in several Montessori schools, and found very rigid curricula in place — you must use the Montessori bells, the Montessori blocks. There’s nothing programmatic like this in Waldorf education at all, the teachers are very free to approach subjects in their own way.

The only possible exception that I’m aware of, is the subject of eurythmy, which is taught at all Waldorf schools. Eurythmy is truly another art altogether, it’s a kind of poetry or music in motion. Each sound has a corresponding gesture, and if it’s badly taught, it can be quite rigid. The more you get into eurythmy, however, the more you’ll discover that it truly is an entire new art form, and very much one of the future.

There are specific reasons why I am pushing Rudolf Steiner on this forum, because he warned of a very particular cult of materialism that would arise in America around now; and with the advent of 5G, the Internet of Things and the global super-surveillance state, this cult is now seeking to dominate the world, exactly as Steiner predicted. The profusion of cults and gurus we see is a reflection of this, including NXIVM.

Listen: when Pi**agate hit, I took it upon myself to do a full investigation of the Waldorf school associated with the Comet Ping-Pong pizza parlor. Large swathes of the liberal tech elite don’t want their own kids overexposed to technology and smartphone screens, so they send their kids to Waldorf schools. I’ve said flatly and will repeat, that there are cranks and posers and infiltrators within the Steiner movement, be very careful. But the founding principles of Waldorf education are extremely sound.

Sorry; very difficult to keep this short. I am going to try get more to the point in future, about the particular dangers Steiner saw arising in America in our present era.

I realized that the second to last line should have read:

“in fairness, I should have noted that I don’t think [ALL] Waldorf schools teach that things like gnomes are real.”

The problem is, that some teachers and some schools do teach some of the worst of Steiner’s Anthroposophist nonsense, or at least teach and treat children based on accepting or believing it, and they can never outright reject any of it because of the culty orthodox ideological adherence that prevents them from overtly acknowledging that their guru was ever wrong about anything. Thus classrooms still have to be painted in the particular colors that Steiner originally specified rather than say a choice of calming pastels, and kids have to be held back in learning to read according to some largely uninformed theory laid down more than a century ago regardless of what the best modern research says about childhood development.

When it comes to racism, US Waldorf schools explicitly reject it – though one or two cases are questionable (I did a quick check of the one that is perhaps most infamous, and its online photos are mostly full of white kids, in spite of its being located in a very diverse city). The problem is, it’s a “yes, but” sort of situation – Steiner’s more progressive statements can be taken to mean that he thought that non-Aryans could be educated and brought up to the same level as white people, but there’s still the underlying presumption, based on his explicit doctrines of karma and reincarnation by race, that such people have different origins and still-persistent differences. This is the best that an official Waldorf defense/apologist site can come up with:

“In our own epoch the concept of race will gradually disappear along with all the differences that are relics of earlier times….We can still speak of races but only in the sense that the real concept of races is losing its validity.” https://waldorfanswers.org/ARacistMyth.htm (a pro-Waldorf site)

And it turns out that Steiner’s underlying belief in how that will come about, is through some sort of extinction of the other races, with the superior white race coming out on top:

“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 (weiß) race is the future, the race that is spiritually creative.” https://sites.google.com/site/waldorfwatch/steiners-racism

Again, the problem is that there are contemporary reports of non-Aryan children being treated differently in Waldorf schools because of their race, based on Steiner’s philosophy, by at least some teachers. And Anthrosopophists and Waldorf schools are too ideological and dogmatic to engage in rational analysis and winnowing of Steiner’s ideas and teachings, and admit that some were simply wrong, so instead they can only equivocate and engage in cult-like apologism, cherry-picking and hair-splitting.

It’s sad to see Reniere as an innocent child. I wonder if it’s a case of there was always something brewing and his strange upbringing and schooling brought it out of him and then it grew in adulthood, buying law enforcement and the court systems then enabling it to grow to such an extent. It is such a strange case. I wonder if he can sit back and be shocked how much he got away with. Did he simply go through life being entitled and enjoying inflicting distress on people or does he believe his own BS and is crazy?

Like Raniere, Waldorf also gets them very young: http://www.waldorfearlychildhood.org/directory.php