Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America
222
Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America
222eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819569714 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 222 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Rudolf Steine and the Author's Approach
Rudolf Steiner states that life is to be experienced in the same way that art is experienced. Both are inner experiences expressed through the senses. It is from this union of inner experience and sensory life that we will begin to look at Waldorf education in America.
There is a creative way to write and to read, Rudolf Steiner said, which keeps the faith with living process, and which does not tend to congeal and rigidify ideas. He asks the readers of his books to follow them as an unfolding process, not to seize upon points here and there for momentary stimulation. We must try to keep a sense of the whole at all times. The movement of mind may be fluid, a continuum of experiences true to the currents and intersections of living. Making connections is essential, he said. And to ask for consistency from life is to misunderstand its form. Rudolf Steiner expresses here a common human intuition, for we know that in living forms certain elements lie nearer the surface, more visible, and some lie deeper, more invisible. If we want to come to an understanding of a living educational form, we must approach it from a variety of perspectives and at more than one level. Our imaginations may picture what is not visible.
In a Steiner school we may look into a kindergarten room and see a big toy ship in which the children ride, and the colored scarves in which they dress up. We may notice that the room is not the usual box shape, that organic forms have influenced the architecture. We ask why. What is the inner reason, or is there any? We look through the shapes and colors to the inner, motivating spirit. We do this also with each other as human beings. We see each other not merely as bodies, but also as persons, with feelings and thoughts and abilities not visible in external appearances. The ground we share in life is this inner sense. It creates the continuum through all external changes and impermanence.
Ordinarily when we describe the institutions of our culture, such as schools, we talk only on the one level. We describe the buildings, the organization, the curriculum, the methodology, the audio-visual aids, but we do not describe what philosophy stands within and behind these externals. I want to help to balance this one-sideness, and to look as clearly as I can, and as objectively, at the values, the "beings," who form the expressions of Waldorf schooling, in contrast to the patterns of our popular culture.
James Hillman, whose current research in archetypal psychology time and again corroborates Rudolf Steiner's findings, says, "Ideas we don't know we have, have us." Do we know what "idea of the human being" underlies the schools to which our children are sent? For you may be sure there is such an idea, however unconscious. We owe it to ourselves to ask Parsifal's question "What's going on here?" It is a step toward consciousness.
There came a time in my life when I began to ask that question. I had studied and taught English in a variety of colleges and universities, including the experimental Black Mountain College. Even it fell apart. Why? Why, if we are all so smart and creative and highly educated, are our schools so often characterized by confusion, ill will, violence, sterility? I came across the Steiner schools at a time when the bottom had dropped out of the other methods of education I had experienced or observed. What are the Steiner schools? Why are they growing? I pressed my questions, and I discovered that within the Steiner/Waldorf educational movement there lives a conception of the human being, of nature, and of universe that inspires the work. It is an inner picture that strikes and cheers the imagination for educational effort. The teachers work valiantly for very modest pay. Parents tend to get involved. When so many social institutions are falling apart, it is heartening to notice places of new growth that are bearing fruit.
I shall consider it appropriate in this book to weave together the external facts about curriculum and methods with the interior ground, until the fabric of experience is such that we cannot be sure whether we are in a vision or a reality. We will be in both. Our reality is our vision. We may be unconscious of the lens through which we look at life. To awaken the inner eye is part of the task of education. To see with the inner eye into the inner form is part of perception. How do we look into one another's hearts? How do we perceive the individual nature of a child or a tree or stone or cloud?
Rudolf Steiner called this path toward "seeing into" the new science for our modern age. He called it spiritual science because it recognizes the resources of our thinking and our feeling and our willing as well as the membranes through which they may shine. He was a pioneer in the twentieth-century mapping of this science, which integrates the inner and outer worlds. Though he stands in a long tradition of gnostics, Rosicrucians, alchemists, theosophists, Steiner comes into the material originally and anew, through an inner training which he then makes available to others. He has renewed the science of interiority, calling it Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man.
Anthroposphy, he said, is the inner language of anthropology. It probes deeply the question, "What is the human being?" It is a way, he said, of reconnecting the inwardness of man and the inwardness of universe, or of seeing how man and universe are parts of a common physical-spiritual linkage. In order to see how things are in their cosmic wholeness, he suggests that we turn the glove of perception inside out. It will look the same, all five fingers, palm. Yet we are seeing it from the inside, reversed. And precisely what we see inside, namely the landscape and personages of that inner world, was the territory of Steiner's research. The values of the spirit seem ever and again "the reverse" of materialistic greed and reductionist, alienated tendencies.
Remember the story of the Chinese potter who said, "It is not the pot I am forming, but what lies within. I am interested only in what remains when the pot is broken." What remains when the pot is broken? The quality of the inner activity which has taken place, the spirit of the form. In order to see this quality which the potter values even when the pot is gone, we have to look with his kind of eye. And this eye will have the quality of this person. In other words, the eye is also the "I." Because it is we — not our physical organs by themselves — who see, we will not see more than we are. This is why inner development must accompany physical sensory development in order for us to perceive with wholeness. Inner development is the education of soul qualities, spiritual qualities, ego strength, differentiation, will, thinking, feeling, and breathing. The body itself opens from the inside.
We have observed then that when people ask what things are, they don't want to know just the physical characteristics, the content and definition; they want to know something more. They sense a quality. So when we ask what is going on in certain schools, we cannot be satisfied by a description of procedures alone. Externals can be duplicated. They can be put on like a mask for a few hours a day. This is okay. Masks are probably a good influence. But we are interested here not in the mask alone, but in what stands behind.
It is like a work of art. We are interested not only in the clay and the glazes, but in the image, the form, the intention. We see not only the pigment and the contours on the painter's canvas, but an inner world through the window of the artist's soul. It is a world of color and tone and ambience, undefinable. It is a world that contains us all. Its light shines in the walls of clay, the twists of fibre, the rings of wood, the grain of stone, the skin of water, draft of fire.
When I was a child, this light shone in all the daily facts of life (it still does). I was incredulous with wonder and amusement at the way words sound: pink, for example, or mush or wet. Brothers and sisters, mother and father, aunt and uncle, neighbors, were mysteries. Houses, rooftops, gardens, horizons, roads and cars, clothes, tools, books — stockings and garters seemed to me especially fabulous. A pencil box? A drawer? I was awestruck by both life and death.
In the schoolroom and in the family, for the most part, merriment and wonder were not encouraged. They seemed exaggerated, implausible, undignified. The facts of life were defined in a way that turned them into information rather than living mysteries. Education and religion tried to convince me that what was inside a person, a soul for instance, might be important, but that what was inside me had no connection with what was inside pink or brother or road or tree or ant. There were human beings, and there were things, and there were animals and plants and there was God, and there seemed to be a gap between one thing and another. A person stood outside somehow. There didn't seem to be much sense of connection, except in the mind. We could think about relationships of kinship, space, time, species. There were knowledge and prayer. But in experience things were separated. And any significant experience of inwardness seemed confined to the human being. It felt to me like being in a box and looking out through eyeholes and getting messages over earphones. Of course there was God, who was said to love us even though we didn't deserve it, we being so small and sinful. I felt some embarrassment for God about this. He seemed self-righteous and belittling. My soul didn't grow strong by being told how unworthy I was. The impression given was that life was a disaster, that it would be better not to be born, and that the only thing to hope for was a better shake in the "beyond." Art turned to absurdity for its inspiration. Where else?
This seemed to me an ungenerous and stifling view to take of oneself and the world. I was confused by the sneers and jeers at the human condition. Intuitions of nobility, courage, humor, sympathy, diligence, creativity all seemed to have to be justified in an atmosphere of basic negativity. It was hard going. It still is. To stay true to primal wonder in such a cynical age is a challenge.
So what was life then? Life was going to school and working for money and falling in love and spending time. Life was reading and writing and making things and being athletic and having a garden and joining a community. And when everything went wrong, which usually meant that a personal relationship had terminated, the ego consciousness which had been "trying so hard to make things come out well" (i.e., to control everything) fell into ruin. And then there was psychotherapy, and the discovery of the rest of the self who was throwing monkey wrenches into the ego's totalitarian plans. The rest of the self had a lot of that child in it, who felt rejected, and discredited, and unloved, and unloving. Actually it felt a lot of hatred and resentment and anger at having been betrayed by the authoritarian viewpoint of home, school, and church. I don't mean the authority of persons; I mean the authority of a point of view about humankind which did not honor mystery, awe, merriment, and wonder. That point of view was closed off from the interiority, even of things it did believe in, like greed, appetite, and anxiety. It is quite an eyeful when we begin to take in the whole inner landscape of our humanity. T. S. Eliot said, "Humankind cannot stand very much reality." Is that true?
When I worked with a therapist-teacher, who was a Jungian, I discovered the objective existence of the human psyche: not just my own personal psyche, but the underlying one I share with everyone else: what Jung calls the collective unconscious. It was wonderful to re-enter that experience of feeling alive to myself through and through, not just topside in consciousness. It was wonderful to feel that my daily conscious life was part of a larger, ongoing conscious life at other levels which mostly we aren't aware of. It was a life-saving, life-giving reentry.
From Jung I learned the reality of the objective psyche, empirically — not as belief. Rudolf Steiner's research widened the horizons of consciousness to include all things and beings, not only humans. From Steiner I learned the spiritual being of the natural world and of the universe as well as that of human persons. One world. A self-consistent universe, and one, incidentally, that is similarly described by the most radical hypotheses of subatomic physics, a subject treated by Fritjof Capra in his book The Tao of Physics.
Steiner points to the elemental beings of earth, air, water, fire: the gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders. He re-visions the angels, archangels, and archai. Spiritual beings abound. They permeate. Readers of modern depth psychology will recognize the pantheon of archetypes which characterize the unconscious. The psyche is not monotheistic. Steiner says, in "Individual Spiritual Beings and Uniform Ground of the World":
It is not so that all which surrounds us comes or stems from a unified ground of the world, but it comes from totally different, from individually different spiritual beings. Spiritual individualities work together in order to bring about and to create the world that surrounds us and which we experience.
This is old knowledge renewed. The difference between primitive animism and the new "seeing into" the heart of things is to be found in history. We are not primitives. We are modern people who have developed a natural science which we respect. Consciousness has continued to evolve. And now is a time when consciousness moves into spiritual perception without sacrificing its disciplined objectivity. Or, as William Irwin Thompson, American historian and founder of the Lindisfarne Community, said recently in an article in Parabola:
We are at an evolutionary quantum leap, in which consciousness is going into a radical mode of thought. Now, it may be that it is very similar to what went on in ancient times, as Rudolf Steiner says; but even Steiner says that we're not going back to some Atlantean sensibility but that we're going to carry into the recovery of astral sensitivities the whole journey of ratio and logos and consciousness and man as the measure of all things.
This idea is exciting: to feel a recovery of the sacred, of spiritual interiority, in our daily life, in daily things; to feel the renewal of powers of perception; to feel an integration of science and religion and art. Inwardness and outwardness are moving toward each other across the interface, and a new quality of wholeness is occurring in human consciousness. Natural science is developing into spiritual science without any loss of discipline and with a widening of consciousness. When we are ready to see, the organs of perception develop. Or as Goethe said, "Light creates the eye."
Steiner's work is very much connected with the work of his early twentieth-century contemporaries in psychology and anthropology. He was trained as scientist, mathematician, and philosopher. He was endowed from birth with unusual powers of perception of the meta-sensory world. The pioneering effort of his life was to unite the streams of science and seership in a way that would be authentic and available to everyone. Anthroposophy was not his invention any more than relativity was Einstein's or psychoanalysis Freud's. These were movements within human consciousness received by, or perceived by, human beings at the frontier. Steiner often said that we cannot force spiritual perception; it comes when its time is ripe. And part of the ripening is our own.
Life is an educational process from birth to death. We receive stimulation and information, we assimilate it, we change and grow. We learn. Steiner contributed to education at its widest circumference by sharing publicly the results of his personal, inner work. In every human being, he wrote, there slumber capacities for growth and development, and specifically for the development of the kind of "senses" we will need in order to perceive the interiority of the world, in order to "see through." This kind of education is a path each of us may choose to travel consciously. It is an inner path for the teachers in the Steiner schools. Unconsciously, human development is moving in this direction in any case. The initiate, as such a man as Steiner is called, accelerates the process and makes it available to general human consciousness. He is a teacher.
Before we take a step in "seeing," Steiner warns, we should be sure to take three steps in "being." That is to say, the quality of our seeing depends upon the quality of our being — upon the development of our character. Again I find this a very helpful step toward integrating knowledge and character. Morality and virtue are difficult concepts to handle, by themselves. They tend to become dissociated from other human gifts, and even antagonistic to human understanding. Virtuous behavior in itself does not equip us for seeing clearly. It may in fact deform our perception further by being entangled with egotism and fearfulness. But reverence for life enables cognition to ripen to a quality of accurate understanding. Objective seeing, truthful seeing, is the functioning of our inwardness. And so objective and subjective merge into a marriage. No longer divided, we kiss the world through the win-dowpane which is no longer there. No more glass divides us from our environment and from others. We see face to face.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America"
by .
Copyright © 1980 Mary Caroline Richards.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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