The Theosophists

The first Waldorf school was built in 1919 as a school for the children of the then about 1000 employees of the  Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory . The factory was named in 1906 by Emil Molt and partners after Johann Jakob Astor, born in Walldorf in Baden.

Emil Molt was a friend of Herman Hesse from his school days in Calw and was interested in philosophy and literature from an early age. Molt came in contact with the theosophists during a lecture in 1900 and joined the Theosophical Society in 1906 with his wife. He was committed to the group of Theosophists in Stuttgart and for the construction of their branch house opened in 1911.

At the beginning of the war in 1914, Molt was still able to purchase large quantities of raw tobacco for his factory and thus supplied the soldiers during the war years, not without the packets of cigarettes bearing Rudolf Steiner’s Soul Calendarto provide. After the war Molt was in close contact with the state government, organized the food purchase in Switzerland and tried to influence political parties in the war debt question.

With the founding of the anthroposophical undertaking “The Coming Day”, in 1919, Molt’s substantial stake was used to invest the surplus funds of the anthroposophists in the purchase of several companies which, after a few years, failed and had to be liquidated due to the economic inability of the participants.

However, the Waldorf School remained a success and soon increased its number of students from 200 to 1100 pupils from all circles of the population. The founding of the Waldorf School Association gave the schools a financial basis and even survived the Great Depression until its prohibition in 1938.

With the founding of the Waldorf School Rudolf Steiner was in demand to teach the education of children in the sense of anthroposophy. He also began to give lectures and fabulously teach children and pedagogy in the usual way. Here is a typical example:

All we have to do is understand the following: the rhythmic system underlying everything artistic does not tire. The activity of the heart, the activity of breathing, go on untiringly from birth to death. Man can only tire through his intellectual system and his system of will.

Thinking makes you tired, body-moving makes you tired. But since, of course, thinking and physical movement in life are involved in everything, everything makes you tired in life. But in the case of the child it is to be seen that fatigue occurs in the least.

Steiner GA 307, page 123

In this style, the good man for days rambled together entire series of lectures on anthroposophical education:

What happens when we appeal to the intellectual system? If we appeal to the intellectual system, if we simply cause the child to think through an inner decision, to thinking as such, then those forces of the organism which internally solidify man, those forces which are inside the organism, come into consideration the salt-depositing forces are, the calciferous forces, the bone-forming forces, the tendon-forming forces, the cartilage-forming forces, all that makes man strong. That is what is developed by thinking, by the compulsive thinking in the organism.

And man is internally engaged in his consolidation when he is awake. So that we expect the awake-life too much inner consolidation, if we want the intellectual life to be too intellectualistic.

If we let the child think too much, we put into the organism the tendency to early sclerosis, to early hardening of the arteries. The strengthening element, that is, what is done by compulsive thinking, is especially claimed. The point here is that through real observation of the human being, one also gets a tact, an instinct for how much one may expect the child.

But there is a very important principal regulator in this regard. For example, if I let the child think, I teach the child to write in a purely intellectual way, saying to myself: the letters are there, the child has to learn those letters, then I employ that child intellectually, then I will breed sclerosis in him, at least the Inclination to it; because there is no inner relationship of man to these newly developed letters. They are little demons for human nature. One must first find the bridge, the transition to it.

Steiner GA 307, page 124

The quotes above are not from a speech in Stuttgart or Dornach, where Steiner could have had a bad day, that happens to everyone. You are from the lecture series in England in front of a circle of people who wanted to introduce in England the findings of Rudolf Steiner in the pedagogy: 

Current Spiritual Life and Education – A lecture cycle, held in Ilkley (Yorkshire) from 5 to 17 August 1923.

If you are looking for similar explanations, these two text collections are recommended:

The Methodology of Teaching and the Living Conditions of Education – Five Lectures, held in Stuttgart from April 8 to 11, 1924

And with an exemplary quote from page 64:

And so it is actually with the other types of invoices. There is a great deal of emotion in the child when you say, how much must you take away from 5 so that you have 2? – as if you tell him to take 3 out of 5. – And this: how much do you have to take away from 5 so that you have 2 more? – fits much more to life. In life, you’re just going to be dealing with it. And so it is really about the fact that already in the didactics for this epoch of life unfolds sense of reality.

Anthroposophical Pedagogy and its prerequisites – Five lectures held in Bern from 13 to 17 April 1924

For such insights, Rudolf Steiner was visited by a group of British pedagogues in Dornach in 1921, after Professor Millicent Mackenzie, a professor of education at the University of Cardiff and the first female professor in England, and then not crazy but invited to lectures in London to give a talk on Shakespeare, and then to Ilkley, where Steiner gave the lessons to educate the children.

The above cited statements by Rudolf Steiner on the policy of the British Empire must not lead to the erroneous conclusion that Steiner would even have been an opponent of the British. On the contrary, he was also courted right after the war in England:

In December, 1921, a small group of people left England to attend a Course of Lectures on Education. Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, Switzerland. They were brought together by Professor Millicent Mackenzie, lately Professor of Education at Cardiff University. She had urged Dr. Steiner to extend his teaching on education and what is most importantly to the efforts of the Course of Lectures.

Amongst those who attended the conference was Miss Cross, one of the principals of a co-educational school at Kings Langley Priory, and before the course was finished she had consulted. Steiner said he would be willing to use the school as a nucleus for the introduction of his pedagogy into England.

As a member of the Committee of the New Ideal in Education she also suggested that he should be lecturing at the forthcoming Conference at Stratford-on-Avon. Invitation to him to do so was given and during the Easter of 1922 Steiner lectured several times at the Conference to an audience of some four hundred people and gave the inaugural lecture on Shakespeare. On his return to London he visited the school at King’s Langley and consented to undertake the direction of the work there.

Meanwhile Mrs. Mackenzie sets out to organize a conference at Oxford under the title of ‘Spiritual Values ​​in Education and Social Life.’ This took place in August, 1922, and here Dr. Steiner met such well-known men as HAL Fisher , Clutton Brock, Maxwell Garnett, Gilbert Murray, Edmond Holmes and the LP LP Jacks at Manchester College.

In August, 1923, he again visited England and gave a course of lectures at Ilkley under the chairmanship of Miss Margaret McMillan .

Education

The group of people in England that promoted Steiner was associated with the Fabian Society. The Fabians had close contacts with the British liberals, from whom they had once been built. Therefore, in the Great Depression, the Fabianer’s London School of Economics was the breeding ground and defensive fortress of deflationism with Prof. Friedrich August von Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes; just as in Germany from 1929 to 1933 the proposals for monetary stimulus of the SPD leadership and Marxists were fought even more than by the reaction.

Just as an example from Wikipedia to LP Jacks , whose guest was Steiner in 1922:

Jack served as the editor of the Hibbert Journal from its founding in 1902 until 1948. Under his editorship the Journal became one of the leading forums in England for work in philosophy and religion. He gained international support with the outbreak of World War I, when he wrote in support of the war effort, citing the need to defend German militarism and defend “the liberties of our race.”

In September 1915, he published “The Peacefulness of Being at War” in The New Republic“arguing that the war had brought to England a peace of mind such as she had not possessed for decades,” claiming that the sense of common cause has come to pass.

The just mentioned newspaper The New Republic was not quite coincidentally right after the beginning of the war on November 7, 1914 founded by the propagandist of British war policy, here already mentioned elsewhere Walter Lippmann. Co-founder Herbert Groly, who really advocated a left-wing and progressive policy, later broke with the liberals and his former friend Lippmann because of the dictates of Versailles; In 1924 Groly was insolvent with The New Republic.

The New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann through the financial backing of marriage Dorothy Payne Whitney and her husband, Willard Straight , who maintained majority ownership. The magazine’s first issue was published on November 7, 1914. The magazine’s politics were liberal and progressive, as well as coping with the great changes brought about by America’s late-19th century industrialization .

The magazine is widely considered to be changing the character of liberalism in the direction of governmental interventionism, both foreign and domestic. Among the most important of these is the Emergence of the US as a Great Poweron the international scene, and in 1917 TNR urged America’s entry into World War I on the side of the Allies.

A wise and far-sighted strategy of British politics should inspire especially socially committed and otherwise critical people about the Fabian Society for British imperialism, so that they hope for the solution of the social problems in the world just by England.

Hence the entanglement of Annie Besant with British imperial policy over the Fabian Society. Anyone who has not looked at this is usually a little confused, in England, the warmongers next to the operators of orphanages and orphanages and schools to find the poor, the imperialists in addition to women’s rights and social reformers and school reformers and finally the critical Poets in the service of the War Office. Even in the US, British propaganda about magazines like The New Republic rather ”