Hands, heart and head

by KM Tue Aug 05, 2014 02:04

Steiner Schools are not all sweetness and light, there is a darker side. There is a video by Chris Cook at the link.

My first encounter with Steiner education was some years ago. And, as is the norm, it took the form of muddling them up with Montessori schools. However, last week, Newsnight ran a report on the 30 or so private Steiner schools that showed how different they are from anything else. The schools are known for being playful and hippyish.

But we revealed the contents of two memos from the Department for Education (DfE) on complaints about bullying in the private Steiner schools - also known as Waldorf schools or Steiner Waldorf schools - and concerns about racism. ...

As our report made clear, the issues are not ubiquitous in Steiner schools. None of the reports concerns any of the three, open state Steiner schools. But Steiner schools could be susceptible to these problems. That is because of the particular views of Rudolf Steiner, the intellectual father of Steiner schools. The Austrian-born occultist, who died in 1925, left a vast body of work covering everything from biodynamic farming to alternative medicine. It is known, collectively, as "anthroposophy".

The SWSF's guidelines from 2011 said that schools using the Steiner name were obliged to prove "an anthroposophical impulse lies at the heart of planning for the school". Since 2013, this has been made vaguer: they now need a commitment to "the fundamental principles of Waldorf education". Those ideas are based in a belief in reincarnation. ...

As we reported last week, Steiner was, by any modern definition, a racist. He thought black people were distinguished by an "instinctual life", as opposed to Caucasians' "intellectual life". He believed each race had a geographical location where they should live - black people in Europe were "a nuisance".

There was also a hierarchy in races; a soul with good karma could hope to be reincarnated into a race which is higher up in the hierarchy, Steiner argued.

But some of these ideas have polluted some Steiner schools. The SWSF was "horrified" by our report on a diversity training day at a private Steiner school, which had been triggered by a real issue around racism. Four white teachers, asked to tick a box giving their ethnicity, ticked every box. They believed that they had ascended through all the races.

Some Steiner schools also teach about the lost continent of Atlantis - a myth that, to Steiner, explained the origins of the hierarchy of the races.