In order for a child to get the full Waldorf treatment — to pass through the entire covert Anthroposophical training Rudolf Steiner laid out — s/he would have to attend a true-blue Waldorf school from the earliest grades all the way to the end of high school. A corollary is that ideally a Waldorf class should remain essentially intact from beginning to end, with few students dropping out and very few new students entering the class after its original formation. Thus, most students would run the complete Waldorf gauntlet, and teachers would know what sorts of children they were dealing with and how much spiritual “progress” the class — jointly and individually — had made, year by year. In reality, however, this ideal is rarely attained. The attrition rates at Waldorfs seem to be pretty high, and — presumably because the schools need the tuition income — additional students are frequently admitted to replace the dropouts.
Let’s take my Waldorf class as an example. I have photos of the class taken at various stages in its evolution. The earliest photo I own shows the class in second grade, which was my first year at the school. There were 21 of us in the class that year. By eighth grade, only 11 of us remained — nearly a 48% decline — although thanks to the addition of new students, our overall class size had risen to 27. By our senior year, further erosion left only nine of the the students from second grade — a total drop of 57%. Turning this around: Only about a third of the graduating students had been at Waldorf since second grade. Significantly, of my remaining original classmates, more than half had parents who worked for or with the school in some capacity at some time: Most of these families had made a deep commitment to the school. [1]
Bear in mind, this is an incomplete summation of the class’s history — I have photographs for just five of my eleven years at Waldorf, and none for the years before I enrolled. To gain deeper insight, we should begin with the initial enrollment in kindergarten and tabulate all the kids who came and went each year thereafter until the awarding of diplomas at high school commencement. According to the sketchy class history printed in our yearbook, only three of the graduating seniors — a small handful — made the long journey from the class’s earliest beginnings to its final scattering. Informative. But consider how much this does not tell us. How many kids joined and then left the class during the years for which I have no record? How long, on average, did kids who arrived after second grade stay at the school? Did any of my classmates leave but then rejoin us after an absence of a few months or years? Much of the texture of my class’s passage through Waldorf has receded into the dim past. Still, the overall pattern is clear. There was a heavy turnover in the class, with only a minority of students sticking it out long-term.
Another unknown: I cannot state the reasons various parents had for pulling their kids out of Waldorf. Some parents, I’m sure, grew disenchanted as they gradually learned — however imperfectly — about the school’s occult purposes. But in other instances, the reasons for withdrawal may have been quite different: The family may have moved away from the area, or a student simply didn’t get along with her/his Waldorf classmates, and so forth.
All of this bears upon the effect a Waldorf school may have on its students. The paradigm is complex. I knew some students who stayed only a year or two, and in retrospect I’d guess most of these kids were largely unaffected by the school. But some who came and left quickly, or who arrived late (I’d define this as seventh grade or later), appeared to be significantly marked. A student having spiritual yearnings but who spends only a brief time at a Waldorf school might quickly fall prey to Waldorf mysticism, while a student with secular inclinations might attend the school for many years without succumbing.
I’ll venture to speak for the long-termers in my class, among whom I count myself (I was a member of the class for more than a decade; a handful of my classmates were there several years longer than I was). The effects of the school were acute for some of us, although in differing ways. Some of us struggled with the consequences of Waldorf indoctrination for years after graduation — the school affected us deeply, and later we tried to undo the damage. But other longtime students did not struggle. Some emerged embracing Waldorf’s occult mission (although their knowledge of that mission had to be imperfect, since Steiner’s doctrines were never clearly explained to students or their parents). A third group of kids who stayed at Waldorf as long as I did or longer seemed to come through more or less unscathed. I believe these students included those who came from families, churches, synagogues, or other non-Anthroposophic backgrounds that equipped them with faiths or sets of allegiance that counterbalanced the spiritualistic training that Waldorf intended to give us.
One subset of students seemed to be especially well-equipped to resist the Waldorf agenda. Jewish students — especially those who perceived the semi-Christian nature of the curriculum — were often successful in fending off the school’s occultism. Some were, to greater or lesser degrees, overt rebels (within the narrow confines of rebellion that Waldorf permitted before expelling a student). But even on this score, superficial categorization breaks down. I knew one Jewish student who went on to become a teacher in the Waldorf system and a Unitarian minister, although s/he had been a sharp-tongued rebel during high school.
Overall, my experiences, observations, and reading lead me to believe it is rare for a Waldorf school — even one that is profoundly committed to Steiner’s doctrines — to completely achieve its covert objectives with a large percentage of its students. But even partial “success” by a Waldorf school can be seriously injurious to a significant number of students. I think we should all rejoice that Waldorfs fail as often as they do. The chief harm that Waldorf schools can inflict is to pull children away from reality, enticing them into an occult fantasy world that, while pleasing in many ways, is divorced from truth. Kids often emerge from Waldorf schools woefully unprepared for real life in the real world. Some require many years — and sometimes much therapy — before they can get their feet on the ground and begin to live as rational adults. Some never make it; and some, indeed, never try. Some Waldorf graduates spend their entire lives in and around Anthroposophical communities of various sorts — they spend their years in an unending retreat from reality. Others attempt to live more conventionally, holding down regular jobs, participating in regular communities — only to find, over and over, that life after Waldorf is too hard, too disappointing. Having internalized misty, unrealistic spiritual desires, they fail over and over in their attempts to make their way in the world that actually exists.
Would a Waldorf or Steiner school fail with your child? By no means are all Waldorf faculty members thoroughly versed in Rudolf Steiner’s doctrines. Yet Waldorf faculties follow an educational scheme set up by Steiner for the explicit purpose of immersing students in an Anthroposophical atmosphere. So, the question becomes, which is more dangerous? Waldorf teachers who know full well what they are doing, or Waldorf teachers who don’t understand the effects their methods may have on children? Teachers in the latter group might be, in effect, innocently playing with a loaded gun — and, even when handled innocently, the gun can still go off.
A flat-out Anthroposophical Waldorf schools fails, by its own lights, whenever a student emerges without a deeply felt (if mentally fuzzy) devotion to the spirit realm as conceived in the Waldorf belief system. Sometimes, of course, such Waldorf schools succeed and students emerge happily embracing the spiritualistic beliefs and inclinations imparted by their teachers. In my view, these students have been significantly harmed. If you are a parent considering a Waldorf school for your children, you should carefully consider what you want for them. Would you want Waldorf to succeed in leading your kids to the pathway of occult spirituality? Perhaps you can find a Waldorf school that is only mildly devoted to Steiner and his occult preachments. Perhaps you can even find a “Waldorf” school that is not really a Waldorf school at all — it has no ties to Anthroposophy. If you can find such a school, sending your children there may be reasonably safe. But finding such a school may not be easy. [2]
If non-“Waldorf” Waldorf schools are reasonably safe, genuine, full-bore Waldorf schools are a different matter. Waldorf faculties typically claim that they do not teach the kids Anthroposophy. Instead, they claim, they equip students to make their own free choices in life. But as followers of Rudolf Steiner, true-bue Waldorf teachers believe that their ideology represents Truth, and of course — being responsible educators — they want to lead kids toward truth, not falsehood. Moreover, as Rudolf Steiner’s followers, dyed-in-the-wool Waldorf teachers believe that there is really just one correct path in life, the “white path” of Anthroposophical spirituality. Failing to lead children in the one correct direction in life would be, from the Waldorf perspective, morally indefensible.
The truth is that authentic Waldorf schools contrive, one way or another, to one degree or another, to direct children’s feet toward the Anthroposophical path. If this what you want for your children?
— Roger Rawlings
Source: https://sites.google.com/view/waldorfwatchwing/who-gets-hurt
