by Martha Sadler

The following article was published in The Independent of Santa Barbara, California in April 30th, 1992. While some things have changed since it was printed, Martha Sadler's report is still accurate and reflects much of the essence of Waldorf education, seen from an outsider's view.

In a vague way, Waldorf School has been familiar to me for a long time. My editor's daughter, Elizabeth, entered Waldorf kindergarten at the age of five, and at times when my editor was unable to find her car keys I have driven her to pick up Elizabeth, who is now in the sixth grade, and more recently, her little brother Justin, who is now in kindergarten.

Since our editor's idea of on-site child care is having employees' kids and their friends take over the newspaper's conference room, my colleagues and I have had a front-row view of many Waldorf children. We have been treated to impromptu string concerts, and to their singing as they frolicked up and down the hallways, and have occasionally become the targets of their raffle-ticket selling drives. I even willingly attended a couple of their plays.
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As a result of all this, I knew a few things about Waldorf. First of all, the younger children bring their lunches to school in wooden baskets lined with cotton cloth. All the children, boys as well as girls, learn to knit and sew. The teacher stays with the same group of students for several years - ideally, all the way from first to eighth grades. The parents are strongly discouraged from allowing their children to watch television. Finally, I knew that Waldorf schools had sprung up in Germany shortly after World War I, but were shut down by the Nazis, a point in their favor.

I also knew that Elizabeth and her friends, while obviously bright and lacking major behavioral problems, were barely able to read by the time they had finished second grade. Their parents explained to me that part of the Waldorf philosophy was not to push children into things but wait until they were ready, and that the children would learn to read in their own good time. This sounded fairly reasonable to me - I thought of the great minds of history, like Einstein and Churchill, who were late bloomers. Then, a year ago, my sister, who lives in Northern California, enrolled her daughter, my precious niece, in her local Waldorf school. That's when I started worrying.

I began to regard Waldorf with some suspicion. What about Waldorf's very relaxed, possibly whimsical, even cavalier approach to education? I didn't exactly doubt my sister's judgment (even though I always have and always will think of her as my little sister), but since I am, after all, The Independent's education editor, and have been covering education for a few years now, I figured it was time I went to investigate my local Waldorf School.

I began by reading a small primer called The Education of the Child by Rudolph Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, a philosophical movement. It is upon his educational ideas that the Waldorf schools are based worldwide. I also spoke with a number of teachers and parents who had either helped found the Waldorf School of Santa Barbara or served on its board.

"There's a certain idea in town that you don't send your kid to Waldorf to become a bank president, but that's why we do," said Waldorf parent Deborah Brown. Brown, a computer programmer, and her husband, Guy, a physicist, have a nine-year-old daughter, Anna, and a six-year-old son, Shannon. Of course Brown doesn't necessarily mean that either of her children is expected to become a bank president, exactly, but that she expects a Waldorf education to enable them to succeed in any profession, no matter how ambitious. She explains that, although they bought such books as Teach Your Baby to Read when her first child was born and investigated various private schools, they decided on Waldorf because it offered a classical education. "My husband had a classical education in English private schools; I went to American public schools and I can tell he's better educated than I."

I couldn't tell the difference, but what do I know? I, a graduate of California's public schools, wasn't even sure what a classical education actually was. I was soon to find out.

In the first place, Waldorf schools place a high premium on beauty in an educational setting: In Santa Barbara, Waldorf is located right behind the Mission, on the grounds of Saint Anthony's Seminary. By the time I finally went onto campus to begin on-site reporting, my head was so full of theory, mysticism, and testimonials that I looked around the familiar grounds with new eyes. I half expected to encounter a troop of child saints skipping into the classroom - beatific, profoundly courteous, and eager to learn everything there was to know about Pythagorean theorems. In the sixth-grade class, where I spent a day, what I actually encountered that morning was a group of excited, giggling, shouting girls running rampant in the classroom before the teacher arrived, while the boys exchanged baseball cards and stories about their more harrowing physical adventures over spring break.

Later on, I would watch these same children reading aloud, from handmade, beautifully illustrated notebooks, their biographical compositions describing the reigns of the last Roman emperors. I heard for the first time in my memory the story of the decline of Rome, and a very interesting story it is. The children and I then listened absolutely rapt as that class's teacher, Christina Chalmers, deftly constructed the story of the rise of Islam, the conquest of Spain, the Franks' victorious stand at the Battle of Tours, the rise of feudalism, and the divine right of kings. It took less than a half hour. At the end, Chalmers promised she would tell them, in the next lesson, about Charlemagne, and one of the boys in the class actually, literally, uttered, "Wow." This was a testament to Chalmers's storytelling ability. Perhaps even a greater testament is that I can now tell you who were Claudius, Marcus Aurelius, Pope Leo, Charles Martel, and Pepin the Short.

What I also found interesting was that the Waldorf School of Santa Barbara turns out to be a place where the art of education is taken very seriously indeed. It is not what I feared - a freeform playground for kind-hearted art students. It is based on a detailed pedagogy in which students study old-fashioned subjects like history, arithmetic, grammar, and languages: They start learning Spanish and German in kindergarten, and are exposed to Greek and Latin in the fifth and sixth grades. Nevertheless, it's a place where the arts flourish: All the children dance, paint, draw, and play music. And judging by what I've seen and heard, the children like it. How could it be that a school that can do all these things is organized in direct counterpoint to almost every sacred cow in current American educational aims and practices? Yet it is.

There are no grades at Waldorf. There are no tests. There are no computers. The children are not introduced to a single letter of the alphabet in kindergarten, and they are not taught to read until the second grade. The teachers meditate on their individual students every day. This is odd. This is different. Yet this is a system where the children seem to learn.

Worldwide, there are 900 accredited Waldorf schools, more than 175 of which are in the United States. In Europe, there have been plenty of studies showing that a high percentage of Waldorf high-school graduates pass advanced university entrance exams. In the United States, few statistics have been assembled, but Waldorf students are doing well enough to attract the attention of educational reformers. Last year, the first American public school based on Waldorf practices opened in Wisconsin.

Here in Santa Barbara, the school is only eight years old, founded by local parents in 1984, and they have managed to keep their tuitions one of the lowest in Santa Barbara: Kindergarten starts at $3,950, and seventh grade is $6,240 including supplies; more than a third of their students receive financial aid. The school began with only 30 students, and now have 107. They will have their first seventh grade next year.

Since the Waldorf elementary curriculum goes through the eighth grade, the Santa Barbara school is not old enough to have produced a completely matriculated class. As a result, parents much rely on anecdotal evidence to gauge how their children are doing as compared to students in other schools. A few parents, who worried that their kids will not be able to cross into the real world of contemporary education, have had their children take the entrance exams for other private schools and have been, for the most part, very pleased. The school does not particularly encourage this kind of thing. But even founding teacher David Jelinek, whose oldest son attended Waldorf School for the first five years and is now enrolled at Santa Barbara High School, is happy to be able to report that the boy is getting straight A's. However, what's more important to him is that his son had a grounding in Waldorf education, where his love of learning was nurtured. As Jelinek wrote in an early essay on the school, college professors complain that students coming to them are not able to do higher forms of math. "It is not that the students lack adequate knowledge of the basics," he said, "but that they lack imagination."

Imagination is not a quality given short shrift in Chalmers's sixth-grade class, as I was to find out by the end of the day. But at first, all I noticed was that a bunch of very normal kids began to organize themselves into two lines outside the door of the Quonset hut where the sixth-grade class convenes while the main building's second floor is being renovated. Christine Chalmers, a tall, slim woman of about 40, had arrived, and she stood by the door to greet the children as they entered the classroom for the formal start of the school day. She shook hands with each student, listening and laughing as they filled her in on the events of the two-week spring break from which they were just returning. The children filing into the classroom included her daughter, Sierra, who shook hands like the rest of her classmates.

Once the children entered the classroom, another out-of-the-ordinary ritual occurred. The children stood behind their desks, which were arranged in a semicircle facing the teacher, who began stretching her arms above her head, rising on tiptoes, then lowering them. This was a focusing exercise, which went on for at least a full minute, the children silently following her movements.

Next, the children and teacher, in unison, recited the morning verse. All Waldorf students, even kindergarteners, start and end the day with a verse, and give thanks before each meal. The sixth-grade verse ends with the words, "Spirit of God to thee, Myself I seeking turn, That strength and grace and skill, For learning and for work, In me may live and grow." While the children were very nonchalant about the whole thing, I was nearly swooning from the beauty of the verse.

After that there were announcements from the class. The children, expansive and sociable after the long holiday break, exchanged jibes and repartee. They tended not to raise their hands before they spoke. Chalmers, visibly exasperated, told them they were embarrassing her. Even her own daughter joined in the battle of wills, making a joke without raising her hand and earning from her mother a long, recriminating glare followed by some admonition fiercely whispered into her ear.

Next Chalmers reviewed the class's literature project due Friday, on the tales of King Arthur. The study of these tales forms the basis of the sixth-grade literature curriculum. Taking up half the blackboard behind the teacher was her chalk drawing of a medieval knight and lady. Beside this, she had chalked the following verse (there is a lot of poetry in the Waldorf way of teaching):

White waves on Arthur's castle wall

And sun-gold in the spray

And knights like stars in Arthur's hall

And he like the sun of day

Now the children recited the A.C. Hardwood poem to which this stanza, which turned out to be the refrain, belonged. "King Arthur's walls are strong and steep," it started, "By Western shores they stand," and the children intoned it with conviction. On Friday, they would be expected to recite the tales of King Arthur aloud, all taking different stories, which they have read, mostly, form library books. "You have to know the tales so well," Chalmers said, "you have to be like one of those storytellers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. You're going to tell it in enough detail that you'll actually tell the story. Also, you need to bring an artistic projection- on big paper, not just one of these," she said, waving a letter-sized sheet.

It was after this that the history storytelling began, the story of the last emperors as read by the students from their workbooks, and following that the teacher's telling of the story of the rise of Islam. Once the history lesson started, the children were completely focused again, riveted. Though some still tried to talk when they were supposed to be listening, all of their attempted comments had to do with the stories.

Waldorf uses a three-day block to teach each of these segments of story or history. The children don't take notes while the teacher tells the story. The next day, they try to play it back to the teacher, verbally. Then the students each write out their memory of the story, finishing this rough draft by the next morning. The third day, the teacher helps them correct the rough draft, and they enter the final version into their workbooks, which they then use as textbooks. These workbooks are richly illustrated, the children drawing from the teachers' verbal descriptions of people, places, and events. In this way, according to the Waldorf view, their imaginations are deeply involved in the history they are hearing, and the story becomes theirs.

The children showed a great deal of pride and delight in their academic work. As I prowled around looking over their shoulders, they vied for my attention to show me their workbooks. They brought out their geometry work that they had made earlier in the year - not only their own, but those of classmates whose work they found interesting. Each of these books was filled with more than a dozen gorgeous, full-page designs - woven squares, interlaced equilateral triangles, a 24-point circle - that the students had drawn as part of their geometry lesson, using colored pencils, T-square, compass, and ruler. Chalmers had found a quote from Plato on the beauty of geometric forms, which each student had written on the final page of the book.

After the snack break, during which a number of students went outside to throw some hoops on the basketball court, came a half hour of math. I was extremely interested to know how Waldorf would attempt to make sixth-grade math come alive. The vehicle, it turned out, was banking. "Interest = Principal x Rate x Time," Chalmers wrote on the board. By the time they finished studying banking, Chalmers told the class, they would have used every single operation in mathematics. "Except calculus," said one boy. Chalmers, her face expressing a kind of visual sniff of indignation, ignored him, and repeated the assertion. She reminded me of Mary Poppins - from the book, not the movie - only prettier.

During the lunch break, students responding to my informal poll said they considered Chalmers a great teacher.

For the rest of the day, the students split into groups for musical instrument lessons with guest teachers (their choice of strings, brass, or woodwinds). That was followed by a Spanish lesson, again with a guest teacher, a native speaker. Then they practiced Romeo and Juliet in the school courtyard. Waldorf students are not scheduled to study Shakespeare until ninth grade, Chalmers said, but they begged, and since it fit into Medieval history, she allowed it. The girl playing Juliet will stand in the walkway overlooking the courtyard in the seminary, and the boy playing Romeo will climb up to her.

The language and the instrument lessons and interchanged, on different days, with other lessons, including physical education and dance, specifically "eurythmy." This is a type of dance founder Rudolph Steiner developed as an artistic form, which he later adapted for the therapeutic and teaching purposes. In it, dancers use gesture and movement to express the sounds of speech or music.

By the end of the day, as the students chorused, "Goodbye, Mrs. Chalmers, and thank you," it was obvious that these children were learning things that I wish I had learned. These were the same children I had worried about when they told me, in first grade, that their main lessons were about fairies, and that as much as they knew about the alphabet was that the letter A was shaped like an angel.

According to the Waldorf system of education, or the "Waldorf pedagogy," as it is referred to, children before the age of seven - or more precisely, until their adult teeth have come in - are in a very dreamy state of consciousness, and should not be awakened from it. Waldorf educators, who often quote from Wordsworth that children come into the world "trailing clouds of glory," believe that young children's task is to orient themselves in their physical body, and to develop their will. Children at this age learn through imitation.

To attempt to engage children's intellect at this point, Waldorf teachers believe, is possible but a disservice to the children. For that matter, it is a disservice, according to Steiner, to attempt to engage their emotions, which are also not ready to be awakened.

Before the age of six, in the two Waldorf kindergartens (one for younger children and one for the five-year-olds) Waldorf children play with handmade dolls that have indistinct features so that their imaginations can fill in the details. For art, they model objects out of colored beeswax which, as one parent pointed out, is not only malleable but smells like honey. They paint with watercolors on sheets of damp paper, starting with a single color at a time, then discovering they can blend the three primary colors to create different colors and shapes. They create rivers and tents out of sheets of single-color cloth. They play with rough-hewn chunks of wood and with larger, versatile wooden objects that look vaguely like benches. In the younger kindergarten they can help the teacher bake bread or work on other projects if they choose, or they can just walk by and look, or they can keep their distance. The older kindergarteners may help grind flour for homemade bread. They sing songs together, and they move their bodies together in a basic eurythmy form, and they eat together around a little table set with placements.

The fantastical imagery and story content of fairy tales speaks to children at this age, Waldorf educators believe. The tales are instructive in the sense that they generally contain some kind of implicit lesson, and evil is always vanquished. Fairy tales have happy endings. Waldorf teachers may draw from nature stories and fairy tales from all over the world, but they don't change their content: They want to remain faithful to what they consider more or less a historical, cultural, and supernatural record. Even the fairy tales collected by the Grimm Brothers, violent though they are, are not amended, though the violence is not made graphic or dramatic.

In the first grade, children are still on fairy tales, have begun drawing forms with crayons, and are introduced to letters, numbers, and in a kinetic and story form, the functions of arithmetic.

By age eight, children are ready to think symbolically, and to start writing and reading (writing first, reading second). The key to their souls during this phase is beauty and metaphor. Also in second grade, they are ready to move out of fairy tales to fables and saint stories, which illustrate the foibles and grandeurs of human endeavor. (The saints are not necessarily canonized Catholic saints, but people who have heroically remained true to their values.) During this second phase of childhood, until they approach puberty, children are developing their emotions. Until puberty, they need to accept authority. Their intellect and critical judgment are still in chrysalis, and not directly engaged.

By the third grade, children undergo what is referred to as the "nine-year-old change". They begin to get a sense of themselves as distinct and separate from their parents and from the world at large. As one visiting Waldorf lecturer, Themba Sadiki, put it, "Kids love Waldorf because in the third grade they don't have to explain that they suspect their parents are CIA plants; their teacher knows that." At this point, they are told the stories of the Old Testament, where the fall of man is thought to reflect their own circumstances, a certain kind of fall from grace. They learn about tilling the soil, making tools, shopping, and cooking - the things they need to survive, to get through the desert to the promised land, as it were. If they question God's fairness, said teacher David Jelinek, in His treatment of the Israelites and other people, "We don't say, 'God knows best,' or 'You'll find out when you get to heaven.' We allow those kinds of questions to burn in them."

In fourth-grade curriculum, students learn the Norse myths, where the gods are mortal and fallible. The children are drawn into the whole drama of the introduction of evil into heaven by the trickster Loki, resulting in the death of the gods. Here is where they begin geography by making maps of their own world, beginning with themselves and their school, and spreading out to Santa Barbara and eventually the state. "Imaginative learning is a more drawn-out process," said Jelinek, who is now taking his class through the fourth grade. "But once they get it, the basis is there for them to advance at an accelerated rate in straight academic subjects."

In fifth grade, the children study botany, algebra, and the sweep of religious belief in the ancient world, from India through Persia, Babylonia, and the Golden Age of Greece. This is the last year that the children are totally immersed in myth, because by sixth grade they are ready to turn to biography.

The fifth-grade class is taught by Diana Estep, a Waldorf teacher from England who is well-versed in Waldorf pedagogy. All three of her children are Waldorf graduates.

Estep took quite a bit of time to answer my questions about Waldorf theory. Although teachers in the Waldorf method teach from spiritual impulses and adhere to Steinerian representations of childhood development, Estep and others emphasized that teachers do not teach the children anthroposophic philosophy and beliefs; the aim is not to create little anthroposophists. Their commitment is to foster independent, creatively thinking adults, albeit with a reverence for life and a respect for themselves and for other people. A number of parents - Jewish, Catholic, atheist - backed her up on this.

Estep explained to me that Waldorf teaching deals in archetypes rather than religious dogma: Archetypal characters and conflicts are universal. It is partly for this reason that the children create visual images of people's faces out of their own imaginations, instead of from pictures. It is also for this reason that the teacher does not read the stories to the children from a book, but learns a story very deeply, so that she or he can tell it in a genuine, not stilted, way. Estep gave me a sample of this principle by telling, in an age-appropriate level for myself, the fascinating story of Gilgamesh's quest for immortality.

Nevertheless, because the Waldorf curriculum is almost completely Eurocentric, American teachers have expressed concern that children not be first introduced to Native Americans and African-Americans, for instance, in the role of conquered or exploited peoples. Another criticism has been that even within the context of Eurocentrism, the curriculum almost completely ignores ancient Asian contributions to Western culture.

Brilliant as the curriculum Steiner developed may be, it is not sacred, and, archetypal as it is, it can and has been altered. In Hawaii and South Africa, for instance (where there are several Waldorf schools, none of them all white), teachers have substituted local myths and legends for the European ones.

For one reason or another, Waldorf education works very well for most students. There is something to be learned here. It is not that successful students necessarily come from highly educated parents, because that is not true of all Waldorf parents. Nor does wealth or lack of it determine whether or not a school works, because Waldorf School is not wealthy. I graduated from high school in the wealthy, all-white, Marin County school district. My parents were well-educated. Yet the rise and fall of ancient Rome was to me just a dull chapter in a textbook, from which I, and many of my classmates, absorbed exactly nothing.

Certainly there are plenty of public school teachers who are incredibly talented, dedicated, and knowledgeable, so it is not that Waldorf teachers are simply better than public school teachers. But the difference may be that Waldorf teachers, though they work very hard, are nevertheless less burdened with bureaucratic rigmarole. The teachers do not have to answer to a principal or administrative hierarchy, because the Waldorf School is collegially run, by consensus among teachers and parents. The teachers do not have distracting curricular requirements handed down from state or local authorities, and do not have to worry about testing or grades. What they do have is an essentially sound, thoughtful, comprehensive method and curriculum in which they personally believe. That in itself sets a very fine example.

So I am relieved. I'm glad that my precious niece is getting a Waldorf education. And by the time she's in the sixth grade, I'll be ready for her. Now I know who Pepin the Short is. I also know who his son is. Do you?

This article orginally appeared in The Independent of Santa Barbara, CA on April 30th, 1992.