Faith Schoolers Anonymous

Keeping the faith – Are Steiner schools religious?

“Stop taking parents for mugs. Stop pretending that Anthroposophy is not promoted or taught in the schools, as if it were somehow unimportant. Be honest.”

Are Steiner schools religious? It’s rare to find a straightforward answer to this question and it is one the movement itself struggles with. Usually the question is answered along the lines of not adhering to any particular faith or denomination but instead cultivating a more vague form of spirituality and ‘reverence’ for nature.

The Steiner educator Eugene Schwartz was unequivocal on the place of religion:

‘I’m glad my daughter gets to speak about God every morning: that’s why I send her to a Waldorf school… I send my daughter to a Waldorf school so that she can have a religious experience. So that she learns something about reverence. So that she learns something about respecting a higher being… To deny the religious basis of Waldorf education… to satisfy public school superintendents, or a talk show host, or a newspaper reporter, is very, very wrong. And the Waldorf leadership, I would say, are waffling on this matter. I would say we are religious schools.’

But what kind of religion is he talking about? The truth is that Rudolf Steiner took Christianity as his starting point but developed his own very different interpretation of the place of Christ in the history of humanity and in his central doctrine of Anthroposophy. As a result he’s equally derided for this by both secularists and mainstream Christians.

In the Autumn 2011 edition of New View magazine, Steiner early years consultant and educator Jill Taplin, in the article ‘Reflections on some early childhood questions’, discusses two book reviews and adds her own thoughts on issues that the books raise.

The first book, ‘The Seasonal Festivals in Early Childhood: seeking the universally human’, is a compilation of articles on the important place the celebration of festivals has in Steiner education. The book makes clear that festivals celebrated at Steiner schools are Christian ones, but that the customs and practices involved in their celebration are recognisably anthroposophical. ‘Anthroposophy’, Taplin says, ‘is inseparable from the concept of evolutionary Christianity’ (i.e. that ‘the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ were essential to the survival and development of humanity and the earth’).

This is strong stuff for a movement which publicly distances itself from any particular religious creed.

The second book Taplin refers to is ‘Meeting the Child in Steiner Kindergartens: an exploration of beliefs, values and practices’ which is based on a joint research project by the University of Plymouth and the Hereford Steiner Academy. ‘Meeting the child’ refers to an acknowledgement of the spiritual dimension in Steiner education and the unusual practices this can lead to:

‘We trust the spirit within the child and we endeavour to meet and understand that spirit and its purposes… We trust that the child, given time to play uninterrupted (as part of a rhythmically structured day), will do what he needs to and learn what he needs to.’

I can’t help wondering whether this commitment to uninterrupted play can explain the frequent and widespread reports of bullying and physical violence, even in the Steiner kindergarten, that is allowed to continue and get out of hand, allegedly for the greater good of the children’s karma and spiritual development.

Parents believe they have encountered religious intolerance or even indoctrination at Steiner schools

When such problems arise, however, Taplin blames a breakdown in communication with the parents or a failure to ‘meet the child’. For parents with more conventional approaches to parenting who, for example, believe that young children do need to understand where the boundaries of acceptable behaviour lie, Taplin explains that:

‘The [parents’] next step is frequently to do some research online and immediately they find “Waldorf Critics” sites portraying our movement as racist, a religious cult, or, at the very least, doing and saying some very odd things. Many Waldorf critics…are former Waldorf parents. They are examples of breakdowns in communication, perhaps because through various experiences they believe that they have encountered religious intolerance or even indoctrination, or perhaps because they feel that the school has misunderstood and let their child down badly in some way.’

Taplin believes that Steiner practitioners can often ‘speak out of habit without appreciating that our listener doesn’t understand some of the phrases that we use so easily’ and notes that ‘when thoughts are clearly expressed they are more easily trusted.

Now that may be true, but I’d go further: by all means keep the faith, but stop taking parents for mugs. Stop pretending that anthroposophy is not promoted or taught in the schools, as if it were somehow unimportant. Be honest, tell us what you are really about and don’t underestimate the ability and motivation of parents to understand what’s really going on.

Mark Hayes

This an edited version of an extended piece first published on the site Steiner’s Mirror.

See the previous posts about Steiner schools on Faith Schoolers Anonymous: ‘You don’t expect a school to lie’, and ‘Supressing criticism, manufacturing support’.

Christian fundamentalism and home-schooling: confusing, isolating, disheartening

“The culture of the fanatical, fundamentalist, Christian right was so unhealthy for my parents that they ended up making very basic errors in judgement that could easily have been avoided”

When asked, I say I was home-schooled because it’s an easier answer than the truth, but the difficulty is that then people tend to have follow-up questions. The most common of which is “My sister/uncle/colleague/vet is considering home-schooling their kids. What do you think?” That is when I have to level with people that I’ve no idea what I think about home-schooling, because I wasn’t home-schooled. I was left alone with books. For years.

My parents were the kind of ultra-fundamentalist Christians that only ex-hell-raising hippies can be. Before I was born they travelled around in a kind of semi-converted campervan. Most of my early childhood, though, was pretty normal for a church-kid. We had a house, my mom had a job, my dad went from one job to the next, I wasn’t allowed to watch He-Man because Jesus is the only Master of the Universe, and I wasn’t allowed to drink 7up because the stringy dude on the adverts was apparently something to do with the New Age.

When I was five my parents started taking the family on short term mission trips during the summer holidays, living in temporary hippie communes with other British Christians in northern Spain and travelling around to hand out Christian leaflets and do prayer walks, which are kind of like normal rambler walks only with more earnest holding of bibles and purposeful furrowed brows.

Over the following four years my family would spend more and more time “on mission” and less time in the UK until at age nine we moved over to Spain. My parents had no ongoing funding, no oversight from an organisation, but they were “Living By Faith”, “Tentmaking Like Paul” and “Full Time for The Lord”. At this point my parents decided that instead of sending me to the (flawed but ultimately pretty damn good) Spanish schooling system, they would home-school using an exciting and innovative company called “Accelerated Christian Education”.

I wasn’t home-schooled. I was left alone with books. For years.

The emphasis was on an individualised curriculum where you could learn at your own pace. The truth was the whole model was based on magazine-style workbooks in which, regardless of the subject, you’d read a page or so of text, then do a page of written exercises on that text, read a page, page of questions… Change subject workbook, read a page, page of questions. You get the idea. I don’t want to write about how the material was biased, racist, sexist, and generally didn’t take into account educational theory. Many people have already written about this much more eloquently than I could manage, and have backed their writing up with research and examples.

My problem, aged nine, was just how mind-numbingly boring and isolating I found it. Maths was just pages and pages of arithmetic, dozens of long division problems per page, work book after work book. I now love applying maths to real life situations, coding on computers, solving problems, but at that time for me it was just pages of problems I’d get wrong, and not understand why because I was, for most of the day, alone with my sister. Literature replaced great classic novels with Christian biographies, simple moralistic drivel and storyfied arguments against science. For a lonely kid (have I mentioned how lonely this all was?) books were a refuge. My grandparents (absolutely legendary people, RIP) always sent my sister and me whichever novels were winning prizes for our age-bracket at the time. To have the excitement of reading replaced with dross, predicable non-literature was really disheartening. Science was just confusing. Much of the curriculum seemed to include short biographical articles about historic scientists, because that fits into the “read a page, page of questions” model quite neatly. The lasting impression I have of the subject is that the writers of the material were more interested in the moral lessons we can learn from historic scientists than the important discoveries these people spent years working on.

The loneliness and lack of motivation lead me spend day after day doing the bare minimum for maybe one of the three hours I was supposed to sit at the desk doing work books, and then watching TV in a language I hardly understood or wandering the local streets in silence with my sister.

By age 11 I had no friends, no confidence, my level of Spanish was still very poor, and my parents were running out of money to pay for the work-books. I’ve no idea what support was offered at the time by A.C.E. but the fact is that less than two years after starting the home-schooling system, the work books stopped arriving, and I spent what seemed like forever with no real educational material at all. My mum would spend hours trying to rub out the answers in my sister’s workbooks so that she could hand them down to me (thanks for trying, mum), but I could still see answers and would just copy them in. I was too demotivated to do any different.

I think my parents realised this had all gone horribly wrong, but didn’t really know how to do anything else.

A good while later my aforementioned legendary grandparents paid for my sister and me to complete some GCSEs and A-levels through open-learning courses. While these courses seemed to be targeted at young professionals completing extra qualifications in their own time, the content was pretty good, and there was a tutor at the other end of the phone for any time I got stuck. I’d spend around a month living between my legendary grandparents (back in the UK) and some friends of the family who would help me cram for my exams which I’d take as an external candidate. I scraped the grades to get into University and escaped to an Arts and Humanities degree that was fascinating, well taught and fulfilling in a university that still feels like home to me.

Going back to the original question that people pose to me about my journey through “home-schooling”, when I briefly explain my experience, I’m usually met with “But…”. But your parents obviously weren’t prepared for the responsibility. But you’ve done very well for yourself, though. But if you were lonely they could have got you involved in extracurricular activities. But those problems are home-school based, not faith-school based. But that’s just A.C.E. and other systems are much better.

And all of those things are somewhat true.

But I believe the culture of the fanatical, fundamentalist, Christian right was so unhealthy for my parents that they ended up making very basic errors in judgement that could easily have been avoided. When they started to realise that all was not well, that same culture discouraged them from seeking and obtaining experienced and professional help.

Anonymous

No freedom of belief, no freedom really at all: growing up in a fundamentalist Christian school

“Everybody that was in the school was from the church. Everybody I met was from the church”

alcatraz (2) — Cubicles or ‘offices’ in an Accelerated Christian Education school

I went to an Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) school from when I was nine until I was fourteen. My parents were deeply religious, so when their church decided to open a school, I, along with my sister and seven other kids, were put into this experiment. The church and the school were blurred into one institution.

I had been bullied a lot at junior school because I was a soft target. The ACE school seemed like a safer environment to start off with, but it became apparent quite quickly that I was really contained within this structure that I couldn’t escape from. Everybody that was in the school was from the church. Everybody I met was from the church. I became frustrated very quickly because you were so closely monitored.

I was punished for asking questions. I really didn’t buy their creationism. When I was 11 or 12, I started to see holes in their argument. Everyone was so fervent in their beliefs, that this was the only way. As a kid, you think ‘Why are you so entranced with it that you’re unwilling to look at other things?’ I started asking questions about dinosaurs and Noah’s Flood.

The church actually brought in an American creationist preacher, a Ken Ham type, trying to fight science with ‘science’. For me that was the final nail in the coffin.

One morning I just went ‘I don’t believe this’, and at that point they started coming down on me really heavily. In a small school, if you’ve got one kid that’s really rattling the pot, they try and close you down and shut you up. Back then, because it was a private school, corporal punishment was legal, and my parents had agreed to it. You’d get the ruler if you were in too much trouble. Every week without fail, I got the ruler, either on the palm of my hand or on my backside. I got numb to it. It was just part of the process of going to school.

The church actually brought in an American creationist preacher, a Ken Ham type, trying to fight science with ‘science’. For me that was the final nail in the coffin. I was like ‘Nah, this guy’s talking guff as well’. They told us humans and dinosaurs were wandering about at the same time. When I asked questions they told me that the reason we find fossils on mountains is because the Flood put them there. A few times I even heard the old argument that the devil put dinosaur bones in the ground. The Piltdown Man hoax was brought up a lot. Even as a kid I was thinking: Yeah, but the scientists put their fingers up and went ‘We made a mistake with that one. Sorry about that’. Sometimes they just said this was God’s Word and I shouldn’t question it.

My mum volunteered in the school, so if I got in trouble with a teacher it would always feed back to my parents. It was a combination of the school ramming what they wanted down my throat and then when I get home my parents ramming their agenda down my throat. I said one thing out of line in a lesson, and I’d get it in the neck from the teacher and then I’d get it in the neck from my parents when I got back. I spent most of my school life in detention.

One morning I just went ‘I don’t believe this’, and at that point they started coming down on me really heavily.

I was just getting angrier and angrier, especially as I hit my teenage years. I was still getting picked on because I didn’t fit into the system. I remember praying to get the flu so I wouldn’t have to go to school.

There was definitely favouritism—the more pious you were, the better you did. Those who were more ‘godly’ were given special privileges, and they’re the kids now that have become leaders in their own churches and missionaries. We had a merit system, and at the end of the week the pastor would take the kids with the most merits to get an ice cream sundae or something. I think I managed that once.

For two or three hours a week, I’d watch services where my parents were speaking in tongues and falling over. They conducted exorcisms and all sorts. It was like mass hysteria. They were normal people until you put them all in a room together and threw in a couple of Bibles, and they’d all just go crazy. I show people videos of stuff like that now, and they can’t believe I was ever part of it. As soon as I hit ten or twelve, I backed away. My parents compared me to the kids that did better in the school. They’d tell me ‘They’re doing it. Why don’t you do that?’ I was like ‘I’m not them. I don’t believe that. I’m not gonna be the person you want me to be.’

When I left, the transition to a normal school was the worst thing ever. The church had told my parents that I would fall in with the wrong crowd and end up getting up to no good. I did exactly as they prophesied. I got labelled by the church. They’d say ‘We’ll pray for him. He’ll end up getting in trouble because he is the way he is’. My parents thought it was down to the devil. Nobody looked in the mirror and thought maybe we’ve put a foot wrong here. It was just because I didn’t believe.

Going to the school affected my life for a very long time afterwards.

It wasn’t until I met my long-time partner that I realised how much it had affected me. As you progress through a relationship, issues come up. As a teenager I was a party animal. I liked to drink and take a lot of drugs. I wasn’t really angry or aggressive, I just blanked stuff out. As I progressed into my mid-twenties, my anger issues were affecting my relationships, so I put myself through counselling. It wasn’t until the second or third load that I got down to the nitty-gritty of the church, the effect the containment had had on me, the inability to escape the confines of it. I was unaware that it had had that much of a negative effect on my life until I spoke about it openly. Now I understand where it’s come from I can turn it into something positive. For a long time it weighed me down.

The thing that affected me was the feeling of being constantly judged. As a kid, I didn’t feel like I fitted in. It wasn’t for me. You were constantly being judged by everyone within the church. They were always praying for you, always trying to get you to participate in the services and stuff like that.

Going to the school affected my life for a very long time afterwards. In hindsight, you look back on it and think it’s crazy. But getting through it has definitely made me a stronger person.

Anonymous