Woman Sees Waldorf Racism On First Visit

By Anonymous

January 12, 2000


Have you seen it written somewhere that Steiner believed white people were most evolved??? This was blatantly apparent in the curriculum of the Waldorf school we visited.

My daughter is African American, and this is one of the two reasons (along with the sexist dynamics) that we decided against the school. The teacher, telling me about the history part of the curriculum, said that since 5th graders are becoming rational, and rationality “came in with the Greeks,” that’s what they study in 5th grade.

The whole “history as a developmental process parallelling children’s development, with Western civilization at the pinnacle” is inherently racist.

I saw the unit study books one class had done about Africa. At the beginning, under their identical paintings of a traditional African man hunting in silhouette, they all had the same saying copied: “Perhaps this life of ours which begins as the quest of the child for the adult, ends as a journey by the adult to rediscover the child…It is in the Bushman wherein the two are finally and lovingly joined.” (Laurens van der Post) I shudder to think of my daughter learning about her heritage in this way.


Note the adherence to Steiner’s “sub-race” sequence of history, the patronizing use of Africans, the Anthroposophical relationship of Africans to children -confirmed in the classroom-, and the literal copying of both pictures and text from the blackboard. All issues that the Waldorf apologists like Detlef Hardorp have been busy denying. No, Detlef, eat your heart out, I’m not going to tell you who she is or what school it was.

That woman had her eyes open!

posted by Dan Dugan