Faculty Conferences

The contents of the volumes “Faculty Meetings With Rudolf Steiner” (also known as Faculty Conferences or Conferences with Teachers) belong to the least reliable portion of Rudolf Steiner’s works. What you are reading is a translation of a summary by an editor of the notes of some of people who were sitting in the faculty meetings. These are not word for word stenographic recordings, and certainly not...

Waldorf Materialism

I came across an interesting concept recently: Waldorf Materialism. It sounds like an oxymoron – after all Waldorf is supposed to be born of Anthroposophy with a spiritual background. It is not at all uncommon to hear materialism denounced in Waldorf circles. So what is Waldorf Materialism? Well, one thing that attracts people to Waldorf is the style of interior decoration in the Kindergarten: Natural fibers, wooden...

When thinking is too difficult

I found this Steiner quote to be interesting in light of advances in technology in education. First radio, then television, and now computers promise to revolutionize education and make the incomprehensible comprehensible in an ever easier manner. Neither radio nor television fulfilled this promise, but somehow computers will succeed where film failed? “Recently we were forced to experience an article in an important...

Steiner on Education

“Vague and the general phrases – ‘the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,’ and so forth – cannot provide a basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at the bottom they are useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be...