Is Waldorf Education a Cult?
No. Waldorf education is a pedagogy, founded in Stuttgart in 1919 for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory at the invitation of its director, Emil Molt. Rudolf Steiner prepared its first teachers with three lecture courses given that August and September: The Study of Man (also translated as The Foundations of Human Experience), Practical Advice to Teachers, and Discussions with Teachers. What the courses give is a picture of the developing child and a method of teaching built on that picture. What they do not give is a creed for children, and Steiner told the first teachers plainly that anthroposophy was not to be taught as subject matter. That instruction has stood for a century.
What the teacher carries and what the child receives
The distinction the tradition draws is between the teacher's study and the child's lesson. The teacher works from anthroposophy's account of the human being: the fourfold being of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; the three seven-year phases of childhood in which those members are successively born; the four temperaments; the threefold organism of nerve-sense, rhythmic, and metabolic-limb systems, corresponding to thinking, feeling, and willing. This is the teacher's anatomy, in the way a physician carries anatomy. It shapes when reading is taught, why the day begins with movement and verse, why a main lesson runs in blocks of several weeks, why the same class teacher stays with a class for years.
The child receives the curriculum: letters drawn out of pictures, arithmetic from the whole to the parts, fairy tales in the first grade, fables and legends in the second, the Hebrew scriptures in the third, Norse mythology in the fourth, Greek history in the fifth, Rome in the sixth, and on through the sciences, the languages, the arts, and the crafts to a full academic high school. The child is never asked to accept the etheric body, reincarnation, or the spiritual hierarchies, and a Waldorf graduate can leave without having heard the word anthroposophy in a lesson.
Freedom is the aim
The founding document of Steiner's whole work is The Philosophy of Freedom, and the education is built to its purpose: an adult who thinks independently, feels with an educated heart, and acts from insight. Steiner's phrase for the first seven years is that the child learns through imitation; for the second, through the loving authority of an adult; for the third, through judgment of its own. The authority of the class teacher in the middle years exists so that it can be outgrown at puberty. An education whose end is the free individual has no use for adherents.
The festivals of the year are kept in Waldorf schools, Michaelmas, the lantern walk at Martinmas, the Advent spiral, May Day, and the tradition does not disguise that its founder placed the Christ event at the centre of earthly evolution. The festivals are kept as the rhythm of the year lived by the children, and the schools admit families of every religion and none, which is why Waldorf schools have long stood in Israel, Egypt, Japan, India, and Kenya as well as in Europe and America. Where religion is taught as a subject, in some European schools, it is taught by the confessions themselves, or as free religious instruction that the family chooses.
Who governs
There is no central authority over Waldorf schools. Each is founded and run independently, usually by a college of teachers with a board of parents and others, and no school takes instructions from Dornach. The associations that exist are membership bodies that hold a name and a standard: the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), which accredits schools and the term Waldorf in North America; the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship for the United Kingdom and Ireland; the Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen in Germany; and the International Forum for Steiner/Waldorf Education, which works with the Pedagogical Section of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. The Anthroposophical Society itself is a public society with published statutes, open to anyone who values the work done at the Goetheanum, and membership is not required of Waldorf teachers, let alone of parents or children.
What the tradition does not claim
It does not claim that its picture of the child must be believed by the families it serves. It does not claim that the teacher's worldview is to be transmitted. It does not hold its teachings secret; Steiner's written works and lecture transcripts are published and in print, including the three founding courses. It does not require anything of a parent beyond a willingness to let the child be educated in this way, and to take part in the life of the school. A parent who wants to know what the teachers study can read The Study of Man, which is dense, and The Education of the Child, which is short, and will find in them a developmental psychology and a method, described with certainty and offered to be judged.