Are you Waldorf enough? Many Waldorf-based homeschoolers ask themselves this question. In my own teaching career, I wondered this for the first several years, even though I was going through teacher training at an accredited institution. Generally, people come to a path as intentional as Waldorf Education with zeal and dedication. This isn’t just a “job,” nor is it a cute philosophy (for people who ACTUALLY look into it). It’s a path of constant self-examination and striving, both as a teacher and parent and especially as a homeschooler. It is therefore natural that people want to get it right.
They may want to make sure they are teaching the exact right curriculum for the right age of their child, or make sure their children have no plastic toys, or prevent them from making motor noises as a young child. In fact, I had a disturbing experience recently. I observed a mom refusing to let her daughter use a neighbor’s plastic toy lawnmower. Just because it was plastic. Then, I saw the same mom try to redirect the daughter from making motor noises while riding her bike. Such things make me cringe, but I can’t judge that kind of rigidity too harshly.
Most parents who come to Waldorf Education were raised in mainstream, myself included. We are, you know, the muggles, and we need the “training wheels” because it’s all new. As a beginner teacher, I sure needed them. While I now look back at some of my early rigidity in horror, I honor the need for that kind of fervor when you’re just starting out.
Does Memorizing Steiner Make You Waldorf Enough, Though?
In considering if you are Waldorf enough, memorizing every Rudolf Steiner lecture on pedagogy won’t get you there. That’s like the bones of Waldorf Education, the “Skeleton of Waldorf,” if you will. Sadly, I can report that many of the accredited Waldorf School teachers have lost the thread. They repeat things they heard in teacher training or phrases from Steiner – the skeleton, in other words – without having penetrated their deeper meanings. They don’t know what makes Waldorf truly live, and parents can feel this. Parents know when a teacher either doesn’t see or doesn’t love their child. In fact, we have a number of students who have come to our Academy for this very reason. Their Waldorf schools have failed to truly “see” them.
This skeletal dogma is eroding the movement. On the one hand, it’s alienating open-minded, open-hearted families who otherwise could become torch bearers of the movement. These families come with great hope but are met with rigidity and dogma, aka, “dead thinking.” That’s one side of not understanding what Waldorf Education is really about.
The other side is watering it down. When you have failed to penetrate the essence of a thing, especially something as countercultural as Waldorf Education, you blow over when the cultural storms come. A great example of this is the emphasis on early academics seeping into some of the most prominent Waldorf Schools. I can point to three very wealthy, prominent, northeastern schools who have succumbed to this pressure. They want to seem relevant to the mainstream, so they dilute the essence of the method so the wider culture finds it palatable. They are quickly becoming just another form of alternative ed, brought to you by colorful silks and beeswax crayons.
So, Then, What Makes You Waldorf Enough?
In an elevator speech, to become Waldorf in this culture means BEING countercultural because materialism has become the opiate of the masses. If materialism were itself enough, then why is the world on fire?
No, neither placating the masses on the one hand nor becoming too religious on the other will get us there. Rather, becoming Waldorf enough – which is really a nonsensical question to begin with – means becoming a spiritual scientist. That means playing with the unseen, even if you can’t see it yet. That requires the humility to admit what you don’t know and the curiosity to find out.
Waldorf-Steiner education is about developing an instinct for how children develop and then seeing each child in their uniqueness and providing what they need. Studying Steiner does help us develop this instinct. It gives us the bones. However, we have to fill out the skeleton with the living flesh of understanding. This can only occur through study, application, review/meditation, and repeating the process over and over again.
Directly Perceiving Students
Consider three of my in-person tutoring students. One struggles greatly with focus and intellect. She has a hard time memorizing times tables or math facts. She needs a lot of right-left brain gym to integrate the two sides of her brain and the thinking midline. Juggling, Bal-A-Vis-X, and other such techniques are both hard and excellent for students like her. The midline knowledge I got from Steiner. The techniques I had to figure out.
The second student is extremely bright and constantly coming up with new ideas. That capacity needs to be fed – it’s like “paying the piper,” if you will – but then it needs to be tethered. In her case, that means bringing her into her feet and the back space. She started reading very early in life just naturally – taught herself. She’s very much in the forward, sensory space. She needs to be brought more into the inner listening, spiritual space – the backspace, in other words. So, for example, walking backward on the balance beam is very good for her because it both brings her into her feet and gets her moving backwards. Yet, this 4th grader really wants to study hard science. It’s not the time, though, and one can tell this by looking at her body. It’s still soft and supple before the tonifying forces of puberty hit. So, hard sciences will have to wait, and she needs to learn how to wait.
The third student is the perfect academic student in every way – easy to teach, smart, yet focused. However, she can be quite clumsy physically. We do a lot of work with the limbs, hands, and fingers, therefore. I hope these three examples show how “being Waldorf enough” arises from developing a pedagogical instinct. The wisdom of what to do as a teacher is lifted directly out of the children in front of us, not a recipe book. The purpose of training as a teacher is to learn the vocabulary of the unseen and then learn to “see” it in the children. Studying lectures is necessary but not enough on its own.
Let’s Plant New Waldorf Seeds
The answer to, “Are you Waldorf enough?” is answered by two other questions: how well do you understand the developing human being, and how intuitively do you see your own child “under the hood?” As I’ve alluded to, Waldorf is not a prescription. Beware when you sniff that out. Rudolf Steiner, a powerful seer, gave this method of education, but he never meant for it to become calcified as it has by lesser minds. (And, for the record, I am one of those lesser minds, but admission is the first step to recovery, so to speak.) Beware of Waldorf idols in yourself, and challenge them through cultivating true understanding. Christof Weichert, the so-called “Waldorf Gandalf,” has excellent wisdom to share on this topic.
To be frank, I’m all about the wooden toys, exposing children to what is natural and living at a young age, and delaying reading. However, let’s remember that Steiner himself, from his own autobiography, was taught to read quite young and was enamored with steam locomotives as a boy. In other words, don’t alienate your neighbors, and don’t get too religious about this whole thing. A form is no good if you don’t understand the reason underneath it and connect it directly to perception of your own child.
Steiner is a good starting place, but we should not be dishonest with ourselves and think we know things we don’t. The best thing is to study the Waldorf curriculum, say, “Maybe,” and then try it out. Test it, scientifically, and see the results. The most important thing is to develop your intuitive instinct. It also helps to have a practical spiritual path which puts you directly in touch with the unseen, as I suggested in my post on Parent Self-Care.
Parent Mentoring
Developing a pedagogical or even Waldorf-based parenting instinct doesn’t happen overnight. It can be challenging to know where to start. That’s why we are considering offering parent education here at Enkindle Academy. This could take the form of live parent training groups, individual mentoring, short blocks on how to teach various subjects like math, history, language arts, etc. It could also take the form of families submitting student work for feedback on how their student is doing. We are open to whatever other suggestions you have. If this interests you as a homeschool parent, please Contact Us, and let us know your wishes. We are actively forming possibilities at present for parent education, so let us know if you want to be a part of it. Thank you!
How We Can Help
Enkindle Academy offers prerecorded and live lessons for students in grades 5-9. We teach all academic subjects plus fine arts, creative writing and language arts, and empowerment groups for teens.
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