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about much more than religious dogma. What draws many people to Waldorf
education is the deep spiritual foundation that encourages us to put aside any
dogmatic beliefs we have about the spiritual world and come to a new study
of the spiritual world based on a 20th century [sic] scientific outlook
(Karlstad, 2001-2002, p. 2).
(…) Anthroposophy is neither religious nor secular. It is a spiritual Idea trying
to find a new place in our thinking that transcends either/or categories. There
is an important difference between an Anthroposophical approach to
education and other approaches. Anthroposophy acknowledges a spiritual
basis to our lives and includes development of the spiritual side of our being
as an important part of the curriculum. This makes it appear as if it were a
religion. Rather it is a new way of looking at the world. Several hundred years
from now, the idea that our lives have spiritual dimension may be easily
incorporated into everyday, public discourse without reference to any specific
religion, or to Anthroposophy (Karlstad, 2001-2002, pp. 2-3).
Years earlier, when I had asked a Waldorf teacher what Anthroposophy is, the answer I got
was—‖the study of man.‖ I would have preferred a more honest approach, an open dialogue
about the very real differences that exist in a Waldorf reality. Better yet, I wish the brochure
I‘d received in the mail as a prospective parent, all those years ago, had informed me that
Steiner‘s esoteric religion is fundamental to Waldorf education and that reincarnation is a
main tenet of the school‘s pedagogy and curriculum. This kind of information would have
spared my family a lot of bewilderment, grief and inconvenience.
―Art‖
Having been asked to hold a fund-raiser for the school, I planned an art competition. The
winning pupil‘s work would be printed on T-shirts to be sold to raise money. I received a
phone call, then a visit. The phone call informed me that competition was not permitted at
the school. Not discouraged, and supportive of the idea of a non-competitive environment, I
suggested that instead T-shirts be printed with a pattern of tiny portraits contributed by all
the children attending the school. These portraits would be quickly drawn by pupils with
black markers on small pieces of paper, then arranged and silk-screened on shirts. Then I
learned that markers were not permitted at the school. Assuming that this was an
environmental concern, which I applauded, I recommended dark pencils be substituted.
Then I learned that pencils were not permitted in the kindergarten and that young children
should not draw linearly! How odd this seemed to me! I was familiar with the work of Rhoda
Kellogg and Howard Gardner who have documented the innate ability of children universally
to express them selves with lines. Also, the Canadian scientist Dr. John Kennedy has shown
that children born blind draw linearly. As a young child I had participated in my mother‘s
studio art classes and had never been prevented from drawing lines. I closely watched my
own daughter‘s linear expressions unfold after giving her a pencil at a very early age—
saving every drawing, planning to document one child‘s artistic expressions and progression
through childhood. Was not Waldorf art-based? Why was line-making in the early grades
taboo?
When the representative from the school who had phoned me arrived at my house she told
me that Waldorf is not an art school, that there is no art or art room in Waldorf and that the
wet-on-wet paintings made by pupils were something else—but what were they, if not art?
Why had I moved across states after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and giving birth to our daughter in Ohio, to give my child what we were led to
believe was an art-based, progressive, nonsectarian Waldorf education? The reality was
slowly sinking in—Waldorf did not offer the kind of art I had expected. There was no free
artistic expression. Typical children‘s drawings were missing from the classrooms. I said to

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the visitor, ―Waldorf is like a cult, you all follow Steiner, he is your guru. I have never felt so
oppressed, this is like a religion.‖ I was right, but I did not know that I was right. The visitor
assured me that this was not so and that she had ―never felt so free.‖ I had no inkling at
that time that thousands of Steiner‘s sermons had been published and distributed by
devotees from within the closed world of Anthroposophy. In those days I had not entered
the occult world consciously, I was in an ―information void‖ trying to function in an
Anthroposophic environment without any knowledge of the occult subtext. I still believed
that Steiner was as advertised—a scientist, educator and philosopher—instead of an
occultist, mystagogue and Anthroposophist. Long after we left Waldorf, as I sifted through
sermon after sermon, I came across the following hint as to why young ―reincarnating‖
pupils might be prevented from using lines, and instead, exposed to color:
You see, when the soul arrives on earth in order to enter its body, it has come
down from spirit-soul worlds in which there are no spacial forms. Thus the
soul knows spacial forms only after its bodily experience, only while the after-
effects of space still linger on. But though the world from which the soul
descends has no spacial forms or lines, it does have color intensities, color
qualities‖ (Steiner, 1964, p 23).
In kindergarten, my daughter painted sheets of wet watercolor paper that had the corners
rounded off. At first, only single colors of yellow or blue were used. I thought this was odd
and wondered why the children didn‘t paint images. I asked the teacher why they were only
allowed one color and what the purpose for these ―paintings‖ was. She said it was Steiner‘s
―color theory‖ and that the children were developing their ―imagination.‖ After leaving the
school, I learned from Anthroposophist Audrey McAllen that:
The colours which the child uses for the expression of the harmonious
connection with his body before the change of teeth are blue and yellow out
of these colours the soul weaves its connection with the hereditary body and
transforms it (McAllen, 1985, p. 44).
In other words, painting a sheet of wet watercolor paper with yellow or with blue helps the
reincarnating soul connect with the physical body. Later I noticed that children were
painting ―discs‖ of color surrounded by a counter color. For example, a blue disc surrounded
by red or visa versa. Years later I was to learn that Steiner also offered his adult pupils
meditative exercises that resembled my daughter‘s disc paintings. Disciples were to perform
the following exercise seven times in the mornings:
Concept of a blue circular disc with red surrounding. Then transformation into
a red disk with blue surround. Reconversion into the original state.
Do this seven consecutive times.
Conceive through inner observation how the thinking thereby becomes mobile
and free in itself and ultimately is raised to a condition free from the body
(Steiner, 1988b, p. 17).
The more I studied Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy, the more I began to
see the ―discs‖ as planets or suns. I now think of the Waldorf color exercises in terms of
mandalas and talismans. After discovering Theosophist Annie Besant‘s and Charles W.
Leadbeater‘s book, Thoughtforms, published the year before Steiner became General
Secretary of Theosophy in Austria and Germany, I began to understand that these types of
abstractions of the spiritual world were in vogue during Steiner‘s day and influenced him.
On my daughter‘s rounded papers she also painted images of suns and rainbows that I later
understood to be Anthroposophical icons. I have since learned from Chassidic Rabbi
Yonassan Gershom that the Waldorf paintings represent ―the creative energy of higher
spiritual worlds.‖