by Unity

Since my last article on Steiner-Waldorf education in which I argued, that pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice, things have moved on somewhat.

In the last week or so Plymouth University has discontinued both its BA and Foundation degree courses in Steiner education, the only such courses in the UK.

Unlike Stockholm University, which took the same decision after concluding that the course literature contained ‘too much myth and too little fact’, Plymouth University have decided to axe their course due to poor recruitment and retention of students, although it is looking at incorporating a Steiner option into its existing BA course in Education Studies. They blame the government’s decision to withdraw funding for second degrees for the demise of these course. The excellent UK Anthroposophy blog has a rather more prosaic take.

Despite this obvious setback, the Steiner-Waldorf Schools Fellowship is pressing ahead with its efforts to get its nose into the state-funding trough by arranging a ‘special pre-election seminar about possible developments in the state funding opportunity for Steiner schools’. This will take place on the 17th November 2009 at the Charity Centre in Euston.

And if you haven’t already guessed the ‘possible developments in state funding opportunity‘ are those already indicated by Tory Shadow Education Minister, Michael Gove:

Under the Tory proposals, new schools entering the state system would be free from the constraints of the statutory national curriculum. Mr Gove believes many parents think the particular teaching styles “and atmosphere of the environment” at Montessori and Steiner schools would suit them and their children.

This event has, to say the least, an interesting line-up of guest speakers.



Leading the way on an session entitled ‘If the Conservatives win the election…‘ will be Rachel Wolf, Director of the newly-formed ‘New Schools Network‘ think-tank/charoty, who will be presenting proposals for the state funding of Steiner Schools.

Before founding the New Schools Network, Wolf was an ‘education advisor to the Conservative Party‘, although her biography omits to mention that she specifically worked for Michael Gove, having previously worked for Boris Johnson as a research assistant.

Of the organisation’s nine listed trustees and advisers, six have a direct interest in diferrent elements of the government’s existing academies programme. Four – Sir Bruce Liddington (EACT) , Baroness Sally Morgan, Amanda Spielman (Both ARK Schools) and Christine Homer (David Ross Foundation/Havelock Academy) – are directly involved in organisations that are operating/opening academy schools. Spielman and Homer are both trustees of the New School Network, Liddington and Morgan are listed as advisers.

Wolf’s presentation will be followed by Sam Freedman, who’ll be answering questions about future Tory schools policy. Freedman is a Conservative Party Special Advisor (to Michael Gove – i.e. doing Wolf’s old job), having previously been the head of Policy Exchange’s education unit until earlier this year. Not uncoincidentally, Theodore Agnew, another of the New Schools Network’s trustees, is also a trustee of Policy Exchange, as indeed was Michael Gove until he was promoted into the Shadow Cabinet.

Finally, Emma Craigie will be leading a discussion ‘about our perception of the benefits and concerns implied by these proposals‘.

Emma Craigie is, of course, the eldest daughter of William Rees-Mogg, who sits in the House of Lords as a cross-bencher having once stood for election as a Tory candidate in 1956. Craigie was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Steiner-Waldorf school in Bruton, Somerset, sending all her four children to the school, which her youngest still attends.

Her brother, Jacob Rees-Mogg has previously contested the seat of Central Fife (1997) and The Wrekin (2001) as a Tory, losing on both occasions, and will be contesting the newly-created seat of North East Somerset at the next election.

As for Craigie’s younger sister, Annunziata (gezundheit) Rees-Mogg, she will also be standing as a Tory candidate in the next general election, in the Somerton and Frome constituency in which the Briton Steiner school that Craigie supports is situated.

With friends like these, plus the occasional, carefully stage-managed Shadow Ministerial visit, its hardly surprising that the Steiner-Waldorf Schools Fellowship are getting what looks for all the world to be a free pass into the state-funded education system from the Tories, who seem to be remarkably incurious as to the background and beliefs of the occult society lurking behind these schools, the Anthroposophical Society.

What will the Tories be funding?

I covered some of that background in my previous article, since which time I’ve been forwarded a copy of the actual reading list (pdf) given to students taking the BA course in Steiner Education at Plymouth University – books listed on a blue background are specialist Anthroposophical/Steiner texts.

This affords us a chance to look at the kind of material that’s being used in the training of Steiner teachers and learn a little more about how Steiner schools operate.

The reading list includes relatively few credible mainstream texts relatively to the weight of Steiner-specific material on the list.

As regards science, there is not one mainstream science text on then reading list, unless you count Gray’s anatomy, while the final year ‘Philosophy and Anthroposophy’ module is, but for E O Wilson’s book ‘Consilience‘ based entirely on Goethe and works promoting ‘Gothean Science’.

It’s also very noticeable, when it comes to the modules on ‘School Experience’ that while most of the recommended texts are mainstream texts (i.e. not written by Anthroposophists) especially in the first year of the course, all of these texts share one common feature: they are all highly critical of mainstream education. Those modules are so unbalanced in their view of mainstream education that they amount at best to propaganda and at worst to outright indoctrination.

One book that does make the reading list for the course is Steiner’s own ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its attainment’ in which students will be introduced to Steiner’s views on race and reincarnation:

A race or a nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the further they have worked their way from the physical and perishable to the supersensible and imperishable. The evolution of man through the incarnations in ever higher national and racial forms is thus a process of liberation.

And if you’ve any doubts as to what constitutes one of the ‘higher national and racial forms’ then Steiner had this to say in ‘Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges’ (The Spiritual Background of World War I):

People have white skin colour because the spirit works within the skin when it wants to descend to the physical plane…but where the spirit is held back, where it takes on a demonic character and does not fully penetrate the flesh, then white skin colour does not appear.

In theory, students on the Steiner Education course could be encouraged to critique that passage from ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds’ and reach the conclusion that Steiner got it wrong, that his views on race do not stand up in light of what we now understand about ‘racial science’ much as today’s Darwinians are happy to acknowledge the that Galton, the Eugenics movement and the Social Darwinists were wrong in their racial and social interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory. That assumes, however, that the Steiner movement is prepared to admit that Steiner’s was wrong, raising awkward questions as to what else he might also have got wrong.

On the same reading list we find Robert Trostli’s ‘Physics is Fun’, a sourcebook for Steiner teachers that has this to say about the ‘Task of the Teacher’ in Steiner education:

“The curriculum of the Waldorf school prepares students to receive the pictures of the Angels. Which subjects help students develop the impulse of brotherhood? Which subjects help them develop a sense of what the human being really is? Geography and the foreign languages. Which subjects help students develop a sense for the hidden divinity within each human being? History and literature. Which subjects help students develop the ability to reach the Spirit through thinking? Science and mathematics.”

Why this matters

Apologists for Steiner education routinely argue that anthroposophy is not taught to children in Steiner schools. This is true only in a very limited sense. The connection between anthroposophy and Steiner education’s curriculum/teaching methods is not made explicit to either the children or, for the most part, their parents, all of whom are actively discouraged from asking questions about anthroposophy unless they already committed anthroposophists.

That’s official line but, as Trostli’s reference to the curriculum preparing students ‘to receive the picture of the Angels‘, that’s not what happens in practice – the ‘picture of the Angels’ is a poetic and highly euphemistic reference to the anthroposophical belief that:

[A]ngels – the spirits closest to human beings – are seeking to create images in human astral bodies. These images are given with the intention of bringing about ‘definite conditions in the social life of the future’ related to brotherhood, religious freedom, and conscious spirituality… If… humanity sleeps though the angels’ spiritual revelation, the consequences will be dire, and aberrations connected to sexuality, the misuse of medicine, and the misapplication of mechanical forces will begin to manifest. Publisher’s blurb for Steiner’s ‘The Work of the Angel in our Astral Body’

Anthroposophy may not be explicitly taught in Steiner schools, but much, if not most, of what is taught aims to prepare students to receive those beliefs. In this there are marked similarities between approaches used by the Anthroposophical movement and those of Scientology, which uses personality testing and self-improvement ‘courses’ (rather than schools) as a means of drawing in the suckers while very carefully keeping all the bat-shit stuff about Xenu and Thetans well in the background until their chosen marks are firmly on the hook.

Also on the Plymouth reading list is William Pelikan’s ‘The Secrets of Metals’, for which part of the publishers blurb reads as follows:

In The Secrets of Metals, Wilhelm Pelikan—in the light of spiritual science—discusses the significance of the classic “seven metals” and their importance for humankind as well as for nature as a whole and the Earth. He also discusses the “newer” metals as well as the virtually unknown “radiation effects of metals”—the effects of which Rudolf Steiner used therapeutically.

As you may well have already guessed, the reason that these ‘radiation effects of metals’ are virtually unknown is because they don’t exist.

Even without the closure of Plymouth’s BA and Foundation degrees in Steiner Education – and its worth remembering that the entry standard for the BA was a mere 2 E’s at A level, it remains the case that a majority of teachers working in Steiner schools in the UK do not have a recognised teaching qualification.

As for the question of how any mainstream political party could give serious consideration to funding these schools from taxation, what we we know to date suggests that a pathological hatred of state education and a hefty dose of political nepotism seems to be enough to swing things in the Steiner movement’s favour.