Love, Truth and the End of the World

The question I am constantly grappling with in the curricula I design and teach is, “What is  this moment asking of us?” There is no straightforward answer to this question. What does  seem clear is that the moment in question—now—is a unique and crucial moment for  humanity. Many leading thinkers believe we are living in the apocalypse, or at the end of a  cycle. Though the term brings visions of bunkers and religious fanatics, its origins are less  sensational. The Greek root means to uncover or unveil. There is the story retold by Steiner  in several lectures about the statue of a veiled Isis in Sais, Egypt that had the inscription: “I  am the All, I am the Past, the Present and the Future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil.”1 Of  course, a young disciple did lift the veil, died, and mighty Egypt crumbled, only to be reborn  anew in the Greek culture (according to Steiner this young man later reincarnated as Mani,  the father of nonviolence). Like the example set by this young man from Sais, times of  endings are also opportunities to raise our consciousness by looking beneath the veil. And  yes, this understanding of the veil of Isis is itself unorthodox according to some  anthroposophical interpretations.  

Science unveiling Nature, frontispiece to Anatome Animalum, 1681

A quote by George Orwell, someone who was always willing to lift the veil on unpleasant  facts, might be a good place to begin. He noted that, “At any given moment there is an  orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept  without question. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced  with surprising effectiveness.”2 Orwell wrote this nearly a century ago, but the same could  

1 From Ancient Myths, Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution, Lecture III

2 From George Orwell’s unpublished preface to Animal Farm, discovered in 1971

be said about the present. We are living in radically untruthful times. The internet surrounds  us with distraction and falsehood—but paradoxically—also offers a perilous pathway  toward truth. Major news sources have become polarized and ideologically captured, in  large part driven by economic factors. Technology (especially social media algorithms) and  politicians have done a remarkable job of separating us from one and other by making us  hyper-sensitive and reactionary regarding issues we care about. As our recent Presidential election has clearly shown us, we seem incapable of having the type of difficult and  nuanced conversations that push us in the direction of the truth. To be clear and potentially  provocative, no political party in the US can claim the moral high ground when it comes to  telling the truth.

We appear to be living out an axiom coined by Arthur Schopenhauer.3 He said, “All truth  passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third,  it is accepted as self-evident.” To be clear, Schopenhauer is being critical here. In a healthy  society the path to truth should be less traumatic. To give just one example of this unhelpful pattern in our modern world, we could look to the origin of the COVID virus.  When credible scientists and thinkers suggested at the dawn of the pandemic what in  hindsight should have been self-evident, namely that COVID likely emerged from a lab-leak  at the infectious disease lab in Wuhan, China that at the time was doing gain-of-function  research on Coronavirus strains, we instead found ourselves hopelessly lost in each of  Schopenhauer’s stages. Why would a society such as ours attempt to suppress such an  important truth in such calculated and manipulative ways? The answer to that question is a  rabbit hole, but rabbits often burrow beneath the veil.  

Campaign posters for the 2024 Presidential candidates

3 This quote is often attributed to Schopenhauer, but some scholars question the attribution

Radically untruthful times coinciding with the end of cultures are opportunities because  lies inevitably become more egregious and obvious to those with even a faint pull toward  the truth. Most students have this instinctual truth drive, but because the forces working  against truth are so strong in our world, students must be given proper scaffolding to begin  

seeing beneath the veil. To return to our earlier example, the unprepared youth of Sais died  when he gazed directly at the truth, much like the slave who was blinded by the sun in  Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when he ventures above ground for the first time. Perhaps that  is why Emily Dickinson wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies.”4 Helping our students to see the truth must be one of the central missions of our time. But  what does this mean in concrete terms? The very notion that truth is objective and true  beyond our subjective understanding of it is something that is debated in our culture and  not something I will explore here (not actually debated as there is an emerging orthodoxy  that suggests all truth is subjective). I believe as Steiner believed that there are objective  truths and am skeptical of those who claim to be in sole possession of them. In fact, Steiner describes this beautifully in his lecture entitled Goethe and the Present: The Misson  of Truth:

If God were to extend to me his right and his left hand and in his right hand held the  pure, full truth; but in his left hand held the eternal striving for truth, then I would  say: Father, give me what you have in your left hand, the eternal striving for the truth;  for the pure, full truth, is, after all, only for you.

This quote points to truth as a verb or a process, not a noun that we can find and claim. To  offer a contrasting definition, Ghandi built his whole approach to nonviolence around  satyagraha, which means holding on to truth, and the objective truth for him was that we  are all one. To return to concrete terms, more than anything, helping our students strive for truth means creating spaces in our classrooms and at our schools for the free exchange of  ideas, especially those labeled as heretical by our unhealthy culture.

She Who Must Not Be Named

In a recent 11th and 12th grade dystopian literature class, we were discussing George  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the subject of orthodoxy came up. The book’s main  character Winston has a strong pull toward truth and experiences quite painfully the  isolation of seeing things that others don’t. In a symbolic act of breaking free from control,  Winston writes the most controversial, unorthodox thing he can think of in his diary: “Down  

4 Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

with Big Brother!” As an exercise, I had my students write the most unorthodox thing they  could think of on a piece of paper, with the clear direction that they would not be collected  or required to be read aloud. It was also stated that students did not have to actually  believe the thing they wrote down. As they began, a complete change came over the  classroom, in fact, the emotional tenor of the room mirrored the scene in the book, full of  anticipation and anxiety. Students were uncomfortable and hesitant to write anything  down. Some asked for clarification and reassurance on what would become of the paper.  One girl wrote something, then immediately folded her paper and placed it under her book.  A few outspoken students wanted to know if they could read theirs out loud. Eventually  several students voluntarily shared their statements and the topic of J.K. Rowling and her  criticism of transgender activism came up. It was clear from the ensuing conversation that  most of my students were not fans of Rowling, but my intuition told me that they had not  actually read what she had written about these issues aside from a few isolated tweets.  Here was an opportunity to pull back the veil, and if done artfully, nobody would be blinded  by the truth.  

Winston writes an unorthodox statement in his journal in 1984

There are plenty of topics that could take my students down the rabbit hole, but the  intersection of transgender rights and women’s rights is one that we as a culture seem  particularly unable to discuss in thoughtful and rational ways. This is in part because  popular culture has been very affective at convincing us of the very materialistic notion that  our identities are intimately connected to our physical bodies and our sexuality. Feeling

very much like Winston, I sent copies of Rowling’s essay entitled, J.K. Rowling Writes about  Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues to the school printer and gave it to  my student to read and text mark for homework. I was extremely clear as one has to be in  dealing with things as unorthodox as Rowling’s essay that in assigning the reading I was not  suggesting that I agreed with Rowling, and that together we would take a critical look at her  words in our next class.  

Before exploring our conversation, I should note that the activity of writing down an  unorthodox statement is not something that happened spontaneously in class. I do it each  year I teach Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the book serves as a pretext to discuss the  prevailing orthodoxy of the day. I mentioned before the need for creativity and artfulness in  these delicate conversations. Orwell’s book provides the creative backdrop in which to engage in a discussion that, without it, may prove difficult to navigate. In his essay Why I  Write, Orwell says, “What I have most wanted to do…is to make political writing into an  art…to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole” (8-10). There is a reason  Orwell wrote novels and not political treatises. He knew that the political ideas he wanted  people to grapple with would be more approachable when delivered through the  imaginative world of the novel as opposed to the more concrete world of the political essay.  Since time immemorial, the arts have guided humanity, and they continue to do so now.  Critiquing our world from the safety of the imaginary world of the novel is exactly the kind of  slant Dickinson suggests in her poem.  

After this build up, relaying the details of our in-class conversation about Rowling will  surely be anticlimactic. It was a reasonable, nuanced, and respectful conversation. It is also a conversation that most schools, including many Waldorf schools, are reluctant to  have. Perhaps the biggest takeaway was that none of the students were familiar with  Rowling’s background, which includes being a victim of sexual assault as a young woman.  Students seemed to understand how Rowling’s biography makes her particularly sensitive  to laws that might make women’s spaces vulnerable to biological males. Of the ten  students in the class, only one came with detailed refutations of many of the things  Rowling wrote about in her article, but even that student benefited greatly from hearing the  perspectives of his peers.

Not every lesson I’ve taught over the years has been a shining example of the pursuit of  truth. Sometimes despite my best intentions my ideology5 or worldview creeps its way into  my teaching. I look back at a number of lessons I’ve taught over the years and cringe,  including a whole unit I taught on The War on Terror during my second year of teaching in  public school. That unit was skillfully designed to push my students to the same critical  attitude of US foreign policy that I had. As far as student feedback goes, it was one of my  

5 According to Oxford Dictionary, ideology is defined as any wide-ranging system of beliefs or ways of thought,  especially ones held by a particular group, that influences the way people behave. In Education as a Force for  Social Change, Steiner points out that the Eastern term ‘Maya’ or ‘illusion’ is best translated as ‘ideology’ in  the West.

most successful blocks. The fact that I engendered in my students a sense of moral  superiority through critiquing our government was something that many of them quite  liked. But what I know now, what I have learned in the last five years as a Waldorf teacher, is  that that block—regardless of the truth it was founded on or the righteousness of the  cause—had no freedom in it. In a lecture entitled Soul Economy: Body, Soul and Spirit in  Waldorf Education, Steiner says, “We must eradicate from the true art of education any  attempt to indoctrinate young people into our own particular ideology.” This is a difficult  challenge for any teacher and it can only be realized through continual self and institutional  evaluation, especially asking the question, “Why am I teaching this particular topic or  theme at this particular time in students’ lives?”

Blog post from my War on Terror block

The Ministry of Truth

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four as he was slowly dying from tuberculosis and  other health issues between 1946-1949, isolated on a small island off the coast of  Scotland. Just preceding this period, in March of 1945, Orwell’s wife Eileen had died  unexpectedly during a routine operation, leaving him to raise their adopted son alone. That  sense of isolation, his mourning, and the intensity of a dying person can all be felt as one  reads Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like other books written by dying people, Orwell was  attempting to download all his insights and fears before he left this world. Orwell’s  prescient last words about the book where: “The moral of this nightmare picture of the  future is a simple one: don’t let it happen.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dark book, and one some Waldorf high school teachers consider  too disturbing and cynical to teach, which is certainly a fair critique. Teachers need to be  conscious of balancing the feelings of optimism and cynicism that our classes convey. At  the same time, I take some direction from Dante Alighieri. In canto one of Inferno, Dante the character wants desperately to climb the Mount of Joy and reach the heavenly heights.  A series of animals (representing sin) prevent his assent and his guide Virgil says, “he must  go another way who would escape this wilderness” (7). It seems Dante must become more  conscious before his soul is ready for the light of the heaven. Dante’s pathway toward the  light is paradoxically down through the darkness of Hell. This gesture of going down in order  to go up might be the defining gesture of our time. Renowned Jungian analyst and author  Robert Johnson also recognized the importance of this downward movement in our time.  Near the end of his spiritual memoir Balancing Heaven and Earth, he says:

It is conceivable that what is required to round out a modern person, to help make  us whole, is to incorporate the downward earthly movement of things. This will  require an entirely new ethos and mythology. New symbols may be stirring in the  collective unconscious to reverse the movement [upward] that has been  predominant for thousands of years (292).

Orwell certainly paints a vivid, symbol-laden picture of his future dystopian society, devoid  of spirituality where the government, inspired by aspects of both capitalism and  communism, has perfected ways of keeping its citizens compliant, loyal, and in line. One  of the most effective mechanisms of control is through manipulating language. The official language, Newspeak, is designed to limit the range of discussions and prevent people from  expressing complex or nuanced ideas. Large swaths of the language are eliminated to this  end. The government also uses euphemism to make bad things sound good, for instance, The Ministry of Love is actually the department that oversees war, while the Ministry of  Truth is the arm of government responsible for generating propaganda, especially through  entertainment and education. Words are also redefined, in part so language loses its  spiritual power. Orwell’s vison of this future battlefield of language reminds me of a quote I  stumbled upon in graduate school by professor of psychiatry Thomas Szasz. He said:

The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. In the typical  Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown  to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is  shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns, but for words.

The first time I became conscious of how our language was changing in ways that could be  problematic was during my third-year teaching at public-school during the 2017/18 school  year. I taught a unit on the hero’s cycle and one of the stories my students read was Adam  and Eve from the Bible. I love the conversations that this ancient text is capable of  inspiring. As a way to help students go deeper into the themes of the text, I gave them an  activity that asked them to list things they thought were good, evil, and a few where the  lines between them felt murkier.

Knowledge of Good and Evil activity  

In my experience, this exercise really meets the 10th grader who is primed to analyze and  contrast the polarities of the world. In one of my classes, two of my African American  students put white people on the evil side of the tree. The idea of listing an entire group of  people as evil felt like the text-book definition of racism to me. At no point was I angered by  their choice but was eager to sit down with them and learn more about their perspective. I  started by stating that their choice to list white people as evil felt racist to me. They shared  with me that black people were incapable of being racist toward white people because  racism is defined as prejudice plus power, and black people don’t have any power in our  society. We ended the meeting by agreeing that at the very least their choices  demonstrated prejudice and were not appropriate. What concerned me at the time is that  these students didn’t seem remorseful. It was as if this new definition6 somehow absolved  them of responsibility for saying something unkind. In talking with my colleagues about it, I  was shocked to hear some of them agree with the students’ characterization of white  people as evil.

In late May 2020, as protests against racism and police violence grew, Kennedy Mitchum, a  22-year-old college student from Drake University, wrote to the editors at Merriam-Webster  to argue that their entry for racism should be revised to better reflect how systemic racism  works in society. In her email she said, “Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race  

due to the color of a person’s skin, as it states in your dictionary. It is both prejudice  combined with social and institutional power.” A few weeks later, Merriam Webster  expanded their definition of racism, honoring Mitchum’s request. Due in part to overly  simplistic understandings of who holds power in our country, this new definition of  

6In doing research later I discovered one possible source of this new definition—at least in popular culture— a movie from 2014 called Dear White People

racism—a word with an undeniable power to cancel and silence people—only applies to white people.7 

Yanny and Laurel

It feels important here to relay another personal anecdote to help paint a picture of how  this changing of language is happening in Waldorf schools. I do so with some reservation,  knowing how sensitive this topic is for many people. In the end, I believe this moment is  asking us to raise our level of awareness, so I share this example, but with real hesitation.

My wife worked for three years at a Waldorf school in Washington state. Our daughter  attended two years of preschool there, both with the same teacher. For the most part, we  were very happy with the education she received. But just before the world went into  lockdown for the pandemic, when our daughter was four years old and in her second year  of preschool, we received the following email from her teacher:  

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with [your daughter] at school I wanted  to mention as [she] might bring it back home. [She] said only girls can grow babies in  their bellies. I told her boys can grow babies in their bellies too. She insisted they  couldn't but I just said I know a boy and he grew a baby in his belly and had a very  happy family. She was pretty delighted with the news and continued to play with the  babies.

After we received this email, I knew the easiest thing to do was to thank the teacher for  broadening my daughter’s mind and be done; that strong invisible pressure not to stir the  pot is how orthodoxy works. But there is too much of Winston in me. Mirroring the activity I  would do several years later with my own Waldorf students, I responded instead with an  unorthodox statement. I said in writing that I didn’t think what the teacher told my daughter  was true.

The anecdote our daughter’s teacher was alluding to in the email is that on the day in  question our daughter was doing imaginative play where her and another boy were  pretending to be pregnant with the dolls they were playing with. My daughter objected when the boy put his doll inside his shirt, telling him that only girls can become pregnant.  Her teacher saw this as a teachable moment. The first thing I think about as I reread this email five years later are the ideas that make these statements true for my daughter’s teacher, for instance, the belief that gender is entirely social constructed, and relatedly, the idea that to be male, all that is required is to “identify” as male8. Even at the time she wrote  

7 White Fragility is the wildly popular book written by academic Robin DiAngelo and published in 2018 that  brought the ideology of the DEI movement out of academia into popular culture. In it, DiAngelo says, “When I  say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and  institutional power and privilege over people of color” (22).

8 For more information on a possible source of these ideas see the work of psychologist and John Hopkins  professor John Money

the email, I understood where the teacher was coming from, why this issue was important  to her, and why she felt compelled to correct my daughter. But there seemed to be objective truths here too, namely, that our daughter wasn’t ready at four years old to  engage in a nuanced conversation about the differences between biological sex and gender (which would have been necessary for her to truly understand the distinction the teacher  was making). The other objective truth is that the female human body is uniquely capable  of growing a baby.

Page from our daughter’s main lesson book around the time of the email

One key correction to the email is that our daughter was not actually delighted with the  news that boys could also have babies, in fact, she was upset and confused by it. My wife  and I had told her that one of the special parts of being a girl is that they have the magical  ability to grow babies in their belly’s. A few days after her teacher’s email, my daughter  asked me directly whether boys can really grow babies. Imagine for a moment being in that  position. The response I came up with was improvisational and tried not to undermine her  teacher. I told our daughter that her teacher was making a joke and that truly, only the  female body can grow a baby. My daughter’s reaction was one I will never forget—she  began feigning laughter, pretending to get the joke. I also sensed in her a subtle sense of  pride as she once again felt that being a girl made her special.  

Without going into too much further detail, it is important to note that we were unable to sit  down and reasonably talk through our differences with this teacher and the school’s administration. Language, instead of being a tool that brought us together, became a  means of separating us. There were linguistic triggers for all parties involved that caused  communication and trust to break down. At one point we were given a copy of the school’s  newly adopted DEI mission statement as justification for conversations like these with my  daughter.

To understand the complexity of this topic better I began asking my coworkers at my  progressive arts school what they thought. Some people I spoke to felt the teacher was  courageous for bringing these ideas so early into the curriculum while others were

outraged. Few if any had nuanced reactions. Reflecting on this stark divide, I am reminded  of an audio meme that went viral in 2018. In it, a voice says the word Yanny repeatedly. 53%  of people hear it. The other 47%, when listening to the exact same audio, hear the word,  Laurel. People listened to the same recording but heard different things. That meme is a  perfect metaphor for how this conflict played out. My wife ended up leaving the school as  we felt our concerns as parents were not heard. We also worried that the new DEI mission  of the school was supplanting Waldorf’s value in age-appropriate instruction. In the end, I  think it was important to raise questions about how words like boy and girl are being  redefined in our society. Even today I can’t quite make sense of why such a powerful  orthodoxy has formed around discussing these ideas. I do however have some regrets, the  chief among them being my inability to bring my concerns with compassion and love at the  time. What I am slowly learning is that truth must always go hand in hand with love.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

My first year working at a Waldorf school happened at the height of the pandemic during the 2020/21 school year. I was hired to teach history at the Seattle Waldorf High School, in  fact, Seattle was the school both my wife and I went to after the incident with our daughter.  As fate would have it, during the first week of training, we were both required as a condition  of our employment to sign a DEI commitment that was authored by a few administrators at the school. In response to the incident with my Adam and Eve assignment9 several years  before, I had done a deep dive into the ideology10 that informs the mainstream DEI  movement. My research showed that framework to be highly problematic11, so being  required to sign a document committing to it put me in a difficult moral position.

It's hard even now to write critically about diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, though  there does seem to be a cultural shift happening as companies like Amazon, Facebook,  McDonalds, Ford, Walmart and others scale back their DEI programs. Part of the  challenge—as has been a theme of this piece—is in the language itself. Few people would  argue that the words diversity, equity, and inclusion are not laudable goals for any  organization. There is clearly so much injustice in the world. But the means used in  achieving these goals are important and warrant careful consideration. What many  institutions have found is that the policies that were meant to bring people together served in the end to push them further apart. This would certainly ring true at Seattle Waldorf  School.  

9 The 2017 protests at Evergreen State College also inspired my research. The protests were in large part a response to Professor Brett Weinstein who tried to raise awareness around DEI initiates at the college 10 The ideological framework that informs most DEI work is called Critical Race Theory 11 I wish I had more time to explore those flaws in this article. A good place to start to understand the  problematic nature of DEI ideology is Woke Racism by John McWhorter, White Guilt by Shelby Steele, or The  Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Echoing what happened before at my wife’s former school, I struggled to find the right  language to voice my concerns in a way that the school administration could hear. To be  fair, asking critical questions about something that most people view as unquestionably  good is a herculean task. This was complicated by the fact that the new Head of School  was hired with a DEI mandate. Raising questions only did one thing effectively; it marked  me as a heretic. At one point during this rocky onboarding process a concerned colleague reached out to say they felt certain I would be fired if I continued to challenge these ideas.  With great reluctance, I digitally signed the DEI commitment. To salvage some integrity, I  insisted upon submitting it alongside a version I authored myself.

DEI Commitment mandated by Seattle Waldorf School alongside my self-authored version  

Signing that DEI commitment against my better judgment is a real source of shame for me,  and it was mandated inside an educational movement based in freedom that should have  known better. Far more than just a collection of declarations and imperatives on a page, the  Seattle Waldorf School DEI Commitment is a powerful symbol, and one that warrants  further reflection. The most glaring omission is the spiritual nature of our approach to  education. In some ways my version was an attempt to infuse that spiritual aspect back  into the language, for instance, by mentioning the importance of imagination and how  powerful one free individual can truly be. Tellingly, I acknowledge Waldorf education as a  solution to racism, while the other implies it is a cause. One of its most challenging aspects  of that document is that it requires signees to acknowledge as self-evident the racism that is prevalent in every US institution, including at SWS. It is certainly possible that racism was  an issue at SWS before I was hired, but why would I be asked as a new employee to

acknowledge that? I can’t help but compare this document to the loyalty oaths that  teachers throughout the country were required to sign during McCarthyism. Interestingly, the loyalty oaths during McCarthyism were a commitment to fight the influence of  communism, while the DEI commitment promotes elements of that same ideology in  reconstituted form.12 

It seemed everything was turned upside down during that unusual year at SWS. The new  Head of School, who had no prior knowledge or experience with Waldorf pedagogy, worked  at Seattle Waldorf School (SWS) for only two years, but ushered in many changes, most  significantly, the alignment of the school with the mainstream DEI movement, following the  lead of AWSNA throughout (the school administration often justified decisions citing  AWSNA’s leadership). The entire faculty were required to complete a mandatory multi-day  online SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) training based on Peggy McIntosh’s  work with privilege. Our school’s newsletters that the Head of School oversaw and  contributed to also became overtly political, taking stances on the controversial issues of  the day. Another initiative she spearheaded was requiring faculty to concede ownership of  their lessons to the school. When this was announced over a faculty zoom meeting, I rallied together my fellow high school colleagues and had the decision overturned. It was the only decision I was effective at challenging that year.  

That same year SWS also hired a Director of DEI—a person of color who also had no  background in Waldorf education—to ensure the curriculum we taught was diverse,  equitable, and inclusive, and to generally help make our school more appealing to  marginalized groups. The person in question didn’t even make it through the school year at  SWS. During his short tenure his push was inclusion, and as an example of potentially non inclusive practices at SWS he noted its stance on technology. During a conversation he and  I had, he shared that marginalized groups—especially the black community—tended to  embrace technology and screen time and that they would likely feel judged at a school that  suggested it was harmful. He suggested the need to deemphasize this value in order to be  more appealing to non-white communities. In no way do I fault this man for reaching this  conclusion, in fact, he may be right. I do however think that Seattle Waldorf School set him  up to fail. How could someone with no knowledge of our unique pedagogical approach  have been successful in such a position?  

The Waldorf core value that seemed most at odds with DEI ideology was our commitment  to age-appropriate instruction. As a justification for bringing overly intellectual material to  younger and younger children, several colleagues at SWS voiced that marginalized children aren’t afforded the luxury of seeing the world as good and beautiful.13 During one  particularly memorable all school Zoom holiday festival for grades 1-12, the school showed  a Kwanzaa video that discussed police brutality and included footage of people of color  

12 Marx’s influence on the current DEI landscape is undeniable

13 Broad generalizations like this one are problematic. There are plenty of people from marginalized  communities who are afforded the gift of seeing the world as good and beautiful as children.

being thrown onto the hoods of police cars. Reflecting on all this now, I think the most  frustrating part of the whole experience was how performative all this DEI work seemed.  None of it was really designed to create lasting institutional change; it was all outward  facing to show the community how progressive and not racist we were. A perfect symbol of  this was the Black Lives Matter yard sign that one administrator put out in front of the  school. What if instead of that sign we had collaborated to design innovative new blocks  that celebrated the spiritual legacies of marginalized groups?

The Beginning of the End

It seems clear that Waldorf education, at least in the United States, is in a period of death,  just as Steiner suggested might happen around the 100-year anniversary, which was  celebrated in 2019. He said at 100 years a movement or institution either dies or needs to  be re-founded on a new basis. One need only look at the schools that have closed in the  last few years to confirm this. These include the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs High  School, Sante Fe Waldorf School, Tacoma Waldorf School, Primrose Hill School, Urban  Prairie School, Tamarack Waldorf High School, and Waldorf High School of Massachusetts  Bay, to name a few. Waldorf high schools seem particularly vulnerable at this moment in  time. In addition to the above casualties, few schools have healthy, sustainable enrollment  levels. The situation is perilous, and begs the question: What is this moment asking of us?  If Waldorf education isn’t to perish from the earth, what type of re-founding needs to take  place?  

My introduction to Waldorf education came ten years ago from two schools that no longer  exist. I had never heard of Waldorf schools when I began my career as a public-school  teacher. As I began teaching humanities at an arts-focused high school in Tacoma, Washington, I was committed to using the arts to push my students’ creative thinking. I was  surprised early in my tenure when I discovered that many of my students struggled when I  gave them work that required their creative thinking. There were a few exceptions however,  and I began to inquire about these particular students’ backgrounds. As it turned out,  several of my students who seemed to have their creative faculties intact had attended the  Tacoma Waldorf School as children. The Tacoma Waldorf School closed in 2018.

After this introduction I started reading everything I could find about Steiner and Waldorf  education. In 2017 I spent a day observing at the Seattle Waldorf High School. I was  immediately impressed with the level of student engagement, especially in a civics class I  observed. The students in this class were participating in a spirited debate about the First  Amendment and the teacher asked a provocative question, to which only one student  agreed. The teacher took particular care in labeling the student a dissenter and noted how  important dissenters are to a healthy democracy. As the teacher explained, I watched this  particular student’s demeanor turn from fearful and apprehensive to confident and  prideful. It was a wonderful teaching moment that has stayed with me and certainly helped

lead me into the movement. Reflecting on it now, I am struck by the contrast of the subject  of that lesson and my experience as a teacher working at Seattle Waldorf High School.

The story of Seattle Waldorf High School does not in fact have a happy ending. In June of  2024, the school shut its doors for the final time after 25 years of existence. There are many  narratives circulating about why the SWHS closed. It feels important to offer my  perspective as a potential lesson for the movement at large. Mandating allegiance to DEI ideology, making sweeping institutional changes without critical discussions, and  compromising core values were all important factors that led to its closure. In addition to  myself, several others also left the high school at the end of the 2020/21 school year, frustrated by many of the issues I outline in this piece. Those others also happened to be  among the most experienced and anthroposophically minded of the faculty. As those colleagues left the school they loved and help build, you might say in a spiritual sense that  the soul of the high school also departed that year, despite the school remaining open for  three more years. This spiritual picture reminds me of a quote by revolutionary actor and  director Joseph Chaikin. He said, “In America many people live in their bodies like in  abandoned houses, haunted with memories of when they were occupied” (15).

Poster for the event marking the closing of the Seattle Waldorf High School

The closing of the Seattle Waldorf High School is a tragedy. Just like the Greeks who  invented drama knew, it is important to hold up tragedy for all to see in order that we might  find catharsis and cleans ourselves of unhelpful emotions. Fear and pity—emotions  rampant in our culture—are problematic. Aristotle believed that viewing tragic plays helped turn fear into awe and pity into compassion. How different would the DEI work that had a  role in Seattle’s downfall have looked if it were truly rooted in compassion for others and grounded in the ultimate truth, that we are all spiritual beings?

A good deal has been said about the harm that Waldorf education has done in the past,  and from what I have heard and observed, I have no doubt that some harm has been done,  especially through curricula that at times myopically focused on Europe. Whole groups of  people were potentially unseen and marginalized by what we celebrated and what we  chose to exclude from our lessons. I believe it is a fair critique to say we need to do a better  job honoring and creating reverence for the diversity of cultures and thought on our planet.  That global reverence must be at the heart of our re-founding. But what new harms will we  create because like Parzival in Grail castle, we were too timid to ask the right questions? There is no doubt in my mind that if we continue to blindly and uncritically align our  pedagogy with gender and DEI ideology, in course correcting for the harms of the past, we  will indelibly inflict this generation with untold new trauma.  

All You Need is Love  

Perhaps the ideological minefield we currently find ourselves navigating is asking  something of us apart from resisting it and keeping it out of our curricula. Steiner  addressed how we might approach ideology in his lecture series The Tension Between East  and West. He says:

And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of ‘ideology,’ those of us who are not  bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the  world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of  development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could  speak of ‘ideology;’ it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision,  conviction, power and courage to infuse into this ‘ideology’ a spiritually perceived  and experienced world.  

Steiner’s idea that ideology needs to be spiritually infused is similar to how he approached Haeckel’s ideas about evolution. He felt that anthroposophy was a spiritualized outbreath  of having digested Haeckel’s materialistic ideas over the course of many years. Is it  possible that this moment is asking us to do this same process of spiritual digestion with DEI and gender ideology? Both of these ideological frameworks certainly point towards  spiritual truths that feel imperative to address in our work. We all want to live in a world  where people aren’t limited by their gender, a world where all people feel welcome and  included. But how can we reach this promise land if we can’t even talk to each other about  the ideas that separate us?

In closing, I return to the question I asked throughout this article: “What is this moment  asking of us?” I believe it involves protecting and cultivating the imaginations of our  children, helping to develop the truth instinct in our students, broadening our curriculum to  be more inclusive and global, working to depolarize our divided world, modeling for

students, colleagues, and the world at large what having courage for the truth looks like,  and perhaps most importantly, grounding our work in a deep love for humanity.  

As a model for this courage, I am reminded of the first woman to be elected to the U.S.  Congress, Jeanette Rankin and her vote against entering WWII after the Japanese bombed  Pearl Harbor. She was the sole dissenter in that vote and was ostracized by her colleagues  and American society because of it. She famously said, “you can no more win a war than  you can win an earthquake.” In the end, Rankin stood by the truth that wars cause more  problems than they solve, a truth that isn’t subjective and that is paradoxically worth  fighting for.

Another biography for our moment, a person who always tried to ground his work in love, is  Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. In speaking about the power of words in  his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed he wrote, “To speak a true word is to  transform the world” (68). Freire was once venerated by the progressive left14, especially  academia, though he seems to have fallen out of favor in the last decadeas he has been  supplanted by academics like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Conservatives have  always disliked Freire and dismiss him as a radical Marxist. What is true about Freire is that his approach to education is rooted in the thinking of both Jesus and Karl Marx. Freire was a  dedicated Catholic throughout his life, and at its heart, his radical approach to pedagogy  was his attempt to spiritualize the thinking of Karl Marx. He became so effective at  educating the poor that he was jailed and later exiled from Brazil. Like Steiner, Freire  believed the ultimate goal of education was liberation. In another quote from Pedagogy of  the Oppressed he says, “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a  commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is  commitment to their cause” (70). I would happily sign a pledge dedicating my teaching to  this radical love that Freire describes. In the end, it is only that love which will save us.

Postscript

In reflecting on Steiner’s quote that opened this piece, about truth being a process, it  certainly holds true for this article. This was extremely difficult for me to write and involved  countless versions and edits. The nagging feeling I kept having throughout the process was  that this piece about truth seemed to lack it in important ways, in part because I hadn’t  actually learned the lessons that these events were meant to help me learn. I found myself  so psychologically committed to the narrative that I was right and “they” were wrong that  the first few drafts read like angry breakup letters. It became clear to me that I hadn’t fully  processed my rocky entry into Waldorf education. The pursuit of truth can be a lonely path,  and the sting of isolation it sometimes requires can last years. The epiphany that came out  of the writing process was that the pursuit of truth must go hand in hand with a deep love  for humanity, and if I’m really honest, I still struggle to find that love for the people and  

14 It is likely his Christian faith is a key factor in his decreased popularity

institutions I highlight in this article. At the same time, I know that learning to love them may be the most important thing this moment is asking of me.

Work Cited  

Alighieri, D. (1996). Inferno. Modern Library

Chaikin, J. (1972). The presence of the actor. Theatre Communications Group.  DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility. Beacon Press.  

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Johnson, R. (1998). Balancing heaven and earth. HarperCollins.  

Orwell, G. (1992). 1984. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.  

Orwell, G. (2005). Why I write. Penguin.  

Rowling, J.K. J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender  Issues. June 10, 2020. https://www.jkrowling.com.

Steiner, R. Goethe and the Present: The Misson of Truth: (Lecture delivered in Munich, 6 December 1909).  

Steiner, R. Soul Economy: Body, Soul and Spirit in Waldorf Education (Lecture delivered in  Dornach, 30 December 1921).

Steiner, R. The Tension Between East and West: Spiritual Geography (Lecture delivered in  Vienna, 4 June 1922).