Waldorf Schools–Cult Education Favored By Progressives

Emily Chertoff writing in The Atlantic (12.2.12) asks a telling question: Waldorf schools are popular with progressives. But how do you feel about a dose of spiritualism with your child's reading and math?

Would you send your kid to a school where faceless dolls and pine-cones are the toys of choice? A school where kids don't read proficiently until age 9 or 10 -- and where time spared goes to knitting and playing the recorder? A school where students sing hymns to "spirit" every day?

Not in a million years would be my answer, but not so for many others:

Some of the country's hardest-charging professionals do. In locations like Manhattan, they sometimes fight over spots for their kids. The New York Times recently profiled a Waldorf school populated with the offspring of executives at Google and Apple.

What’s going on here?  Why would so many otherwise intelligent Americans subscribe to such wacko ideas?  Here is a sampler of the ideas of Rudolph Steiner who founded the schools back in the 19th Century:

Most occultists of the era believed that spirits of the dead regularly attempted to contact or enter the world of the living. Steiner was more interested in the opposite possibility. He believed the living could cultivate the ability to enter the spirit world. After World War I, the director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany --  an adherent of anthroposophy -- invited Steiner to create a school for the children of factory workers. This was Steiner's chance to train children who could initiate such spiritual contact…

Many of the methods used at Waldorf today (for instance the movement exercises and the use of music) are rooted in Steiner's belief that schools need to cultivate spirit -- the medium for contact between the living and the dead…

At other times, spirit serves as a kind of internal clock that orders the way subjects are taught. As the the New York Times explained in 2000, "Steiner believed that people experience a type of reincarnation every seven years, beginning with the physical birth and ending at age 21, when the spirit of a human being is fully developed and continually reincarnated on earth." As a direct consequence, at traditional Waldorf schools, "certain subjects are taught at times that he thought best coincided with these changes."

Whew! A kind and generous observer might conclude that most of the Google and Apple hippie wannabee parents simply don’t have any idea about who Rudolph Steiner was and the cockamamie ideas he espoused; but these are supposedly some of the most intelligent people in the country for whom research and data are sacrosanct.

Many adherents are attracted by Waldorf’s focus on simplicity.  A previous article in The Atlantic limned the praises of a student who spent days carving wooden mallets and spoons, sanding them to a smooth finish, then enjoying the reward of the sublime sensation of the wood on his cheek.  Steiner felt that children should not learn how to read, write, or do arithmetic until the age of eight or nine – cognitive skills could wait, he felt, until the spirit and soul of the child had been awakened to the miracles of nature.

When the author asked why modern students needed to learn outdated skills like woodcarving, the teacher replied, "You almost need it as a balance for the high-tech world."

Perhaps this is the reason why Google and Apple parents flock to Waldorf.  They feel somewhat guilty about how their inventions have created insular, closeted individuals never bothering to poke their heads out-of-doors, smell the fragrance of a pine forest, or the invigorating tang of a salt sea spray.  Maybe they had a Robert Oppenheimer moment when he reflected on the atom bomb he had created: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”.

Waldorf schools were originally conceived by Steiner as religious institutions.  Chertoff cites a San Francisco Chronicle article of a few years back:

"Fundamental to [Steiner's] work is the view that the human being is composed of body, soul and spirit, and that the Christ event is key to the unfolding of human history and the achievement of human freedom," says the Web site of the Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, which is the West Coast training center for Waldorf teachers. ...

[Another feature of Waldorf schools are so-called] nature tables that are staples in most kindergarten and primary classrooms. Waldorf supporters view the tables, covered with pinecones, rocks, and seashells, as a way to teach respect for the environment. Critics view them as altars that promote sun worship and pantheism.

The Waldorf philosophy is very similar to that of the Utopian Movement in the United States in the early part of the 20th Century:

The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in A.D. 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven (a belief called Perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced Communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), Complex Marriage, Male Continence, Mutual Criticism and Ascending Fellowship (Wikipedia)

Wacko then, wacko now it appears; but ‘progressives’ can’t seem to get enough of the crypto-spirituality-cum-environmentalism that Waldorf offers; but at least they come by it naturally via Utopianism and its latter-day legacy – The Sixties.  

At other times, spirit serves as a kind of internal clock that orders the way subjects are taught. As the the New York Times explained in 2000, "Steiner believed that people experience a type of reincarnation every seven years, beginning with the physical birth and ending at age 21, when the spirit of a human being is fully developed and continually reincarnated on earth." As a direct consequence, at traditional Waldorf schools, "certain subjects are taught at times that he thought best coincided with these changes."

Enough said.

Why College Football In The South Is The Best In The US–Lessons In Culture

Football in the South is very, very important.  Towns within 100 miles of a major team like Alabama, Mississippi,or Mississippi State begin preparing for game day long before the event.  There are pep rallies, parades, barbecues; hats, jerseys, car flags, banners, and coffee cups.  The discussion on the radio, at the gym, or on the street is college football.  “Our” team.

Many regions of the US are as supportive and passionate about their teams as the South and huge Big Ten stadiums are filled to capacity on Saturdays; but do intense Southern allegiances have something to do with winning? Allen Barra writing in the Atlantic (12.2.12) thinks so.

The reasons for this unequalled dominance aren't clear. In his 1954 memoir, This Was Football, my favorite football historian, W.W. "Pudge" Heffelfinger, Walter Camp's first ever All-America selection back in the 1890s, wrote, "Southern football players play with a reckless abandon, a wild fanaticism that's rarely found in players from other parts of the nation." That's a generalization, of course. But why does it seem true?

Tradition and rivalry are the reason, suggests Barra.  And the South seems to have an overabundance of both:

The enthusiasm generated by match-ups like Georgia vs. Florida or LSU vs. Tennessee or Alabama vs. Auburn is the lifeblood of SEC football, a manifestation of Whitman's "barbaric yawp" that has survived into the 21st century. This year, SEC stadiums have been jammed to nearly 95 percent capacity, tops in the country. According to a Sports Business Journal study in 2009, six Southern football programs—Alabama, LSU, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, and South Carolina—were among the top 11 producers in football revenue in the nation.

This still doesn’t answer the question why traditions and rivalries are so much more pronounced in the South.  Some have suggested cultural reasons – the South has always been and still is one of the most conservative areas of the United States. Preserving and protecting traditional ways of life and honoring the past has particular resonance in the South. No other region of the country is so evocative of the past; no region has fought so hard to retain a distinctive regional identity. What better or at least more visible way to publicly display regional pride and excellence than through a winning football team.

Sports in America are never just games, but emblems.  A passionate Mets fan (heard any late night on WFAN in New York where the truly passionate come out to talk) will love his beloved team even though given free agency the one he roots for today has no resemblance to the one he supported five years ago.  The uprooting of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to the West Coast were considered travesties. The Baltimore Colts owners were so worried about this same kind of fan reaction that they moved the team to Indianapolis under cover of darkness.

If the visceral, emblematic nature of sports fandom is added to the South’s particular reverence for tradition, you have a heady mix of potent, permanent allegiance; and, as Pudge Heffelfinger suggested above, this fiery emotion is picked up and shared by the players.

Barra adds one more element to the mix– rivalry. The same Southern colleges have battled each other for decades.  The SEC was formed in 1932 with 13 teams and ten have remained.  Two more teams were added in 1990, and additional expansion is contemplated.  However, the rivalries of the ten original teams has continued for seventy years.  Other conferences, such as the Big Ten, started at the turn of the 20th Century, are bigger with a longer history, but when this long history of SEC rivalries is added to tradition, the mix becomes even more potent.

All well and good up to this point; but purely cultural explanations and intense rivalries do not seem quite enough.  Barra adds another:

While rivalries are important everywhere, in the North, Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, college football competes with major league baseball, pro football, the NBA, and even hockey for a fan's attention. In the South, people celebrate Bear Bryant's birthday even though it falls on September 11. Generations who were unborn when LSU's Billy Cannon made his great 69-yard punt return against Ole Miss in 1959 regularly relive the glory of the run on YouTube.

Barra suggests that in many parts of the South, such as in Mississippi, college football has few sports which compete with college football, unlike major metropolitan areas with NHL, NFL, NBA, and MLB teams.  One may already have a passionate commitment to Ole Miss, Mississippi State, or Alabama, but, but since sports focus in almost entirely focused on them, it is likely that interest in the team, its players, trades, management, finances, and fortune will be even greater. Total fan allegiance is enhanced.

Another reason may be that SEC games are played near each other, fueling the rivalries:

Thompson feels that the SEC's gaudy record in the BCS is due in part "because SEC teams usually play in bowls at or near home stadiums, which often results in more favorable matchups for SEC teams."

Perhaps the real reason SEC teams are so successful today is because they are winners. Because of its perennially successful record, the SEC will attract the best athletes, thus further consolidating the supremacy of the conference.  The fiery play on the field may have nothing at all to do with the South, tradition, or rivalries, but highly motivated players who see Auburn, Ole Miss, or Alabama as their meal tickets to the NFL.  The fans filling the huge stadiums of the South may be white, conservative traditionalists, but the players on the field are mostly black and poor, and the main thought in their minds is making it to professional football.

According to the National Football League, over the last 20 years 576 players from the conference have been drafted into the pros. That's more than the next two leagues—the PAC 12 (250) and the Big 12 (224)—combined.

In conclusion, the current success of the SEC is most probably due to the great players on the field, the coaching and recruiting staff, the front office, and the owners – the basic elements of any successful franchise; but no one in the conference can ignore the complex roles of Southern tradition and rivalries, a passionate fan base and a storied football history which got it to where it is today.

Partition The Congo?

The Congo, formerly Zaire, has been a troubled, corrupt, and failed state ever since independence from Belgium. Despite its vast mineral wealth, the Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world with over 70 percent of its people living in poverty. Competition for this wealth, compounded by regional conflicts, most notably the Rwandan Genocide, has resulted either in chaos or in brutal, corrupt, kleptocratic dictatorships.

Even from this fleeting moment of independence democracy began to unravel. On 5 July 1960 a military mutiny by Congolese soldiers against their European officers broke out in the capital and rampant looting began. On 11 July 1960 the richest province of the country, Katanga, seceded under Moise Tshombe. The United Nations sent 20,000 peacekeepers to protect Europeans in the country and try to restore order. Western paramilitaries and mercenaries, often hired by mining companies to protect their interests, also began to pour into the country. In this same period Congo's second richest province, Kasai, also announced its independence on 8 August 1960. (Wikipedia)

Cold war enemies – the United States and the Soviet Union – intervened, and the Congo became a proxy battleground. With US and CIA support, the government was overthrown and Mobutu was installed as the new President.  The Mobutu years were a dark period of rampant pillage and brutality.  As Mobutu became one of the wealthiest men on the planet, the country fell into even worse poverty than before.  The United States, still locked in an international struggle with the Soviet Union, stood by and ignored Mobutu’s depredations.

Once the Cold War was over in 1989, support for Mobutu crumbled, and near anarchy resulted, although the canny Mobutu, through patronage and muscle, was able to remain a political force until 1997 when he was ousted from power and fled the country. 

The First Congo War began as an outgrowth of the Rwandan Genocide.  The Congolese Government, allied by Hutu refugees (Hutus were responsible for the mass killing of Tutsis in Rwanda), took up arms against rebellious ethnic Tutsis in Kivu province.  The civil war was really a regional one.  The Second Congo War was even more international as Uganda, Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe became militarily involved.

Currently, a Tutsi rebel group, M23, supported by Rwanda (although Kagame denies any intervention in the Congo as he always has done), is fighting the Congolese government for control of the resource-rich eastern part of the country.  As of this writing, M23 has taken Goma, the principal city of the region. 

J. Peter Pham has written about this current conflict in the New York Times (11.30.12).  Presiding over this catastrophe of war and misery is the current President Joseph Kabila who awarded himself another five-year term in fraudulent elections, is a master of mismanagement and corruption, and who leads an undisciplined and inefficient army, unable to mount any resistance to the M23 rebels.

In recent weeks, a rebel group calling itself the March 23 Movement, or M23, has stormed through eastern Congo, scattering poorly trained units loyal to the government and reducing a huge United Nations peacekeeping force to a helpless bystander as M23 seized control of Goma, the capital of the resource-rich North Kivu province. The rebel advance rekindled fears of a renewal of the bloody 1998-2003 Second Congo War, which drew the armies of a host of African countries as well as countless local militias into what was aptly dubbed “Africa’s world war.”

At particular stake are cassiterite and coltan, indispensable materials for cellphones and computers.  Although Kivu Province is not the only producer of these minerals, it is the major one; and it is clear that whoever controls the Province will control vast wealth.  This conflict hearkens back to the first civil war in Katanga which was then the richest province in Zaire, holding an estimated ten percent of the world’s copper.  While that earlier conflict also had an ethnic dimension to it, this current one is blatantly ethnic with Tutsis, Hutus, and ethnic Congolese all fighting.

Despite years of international involvement, principally United Nations peacekeepers, civil wars, skirmishes, and conflicts persist.  It is no wonder.  The Congo was exploited by its Belgian colonial rulers who left little in the way of infrastructure, civil institutions, or an administrative and legal framework as the British did in India.  Once they left, new rulers operating in an unfamiliar world but tempted by riches beyond their dreams, continued the exploitation and appropriation.  The Cold war facilitated and perpetuated dictatorship based on international allegiances. 

J. Peter Pham suggests that there is no way out of this continuous cycle of war and violence except to ‘let the Congo fail’.

If Congo were permitted to break up into smaller entities, the international community could devote its increasingly scarce resources to humanitarian relief and development, rather than trying, as the United Nations Security Council has pledged, to preserve the “sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity” of a fictional state that is of value only to the political elites who have clawed their way to the top in order to plunder Congo’s resources and fund the patronage networks that ensure that they will remain in power.

This is a disingenuous if not naïve suggestion.  First Pham uses the passive voice – “If Congo were permitted to break up….” Who would do the breaking up? Certainly not the government which has dug in its heels despite the obvious inadequacy of its military forces.  Why should Kabila act any differently than Mobutu? That is hang on, suck the country dry for as long as he can, then depart to live well on his foreign investments. The M23 rebels, especially now that they have taken the principal city of Kivu, will do all in their power to break away from the Congo.  They apparently not only have military control but also the support of the population which seems them as protectors against the depredations of the Congolese military.  Whether or not they will be content to stay in Eastern Congo is another thing altogether.  In the First Congolese War, Laurent Kabila (père), in political alliances with those who wanted to oust Mobutu, marched on and captured Kinshasa. Why should anyone expect M23 to be content with Kivu? ‘Break up’ also suggests some kind of reasonable federalism. An M23 victory will be unlikely to result in a modern, democratic state.

Perhaps what Pham means is to allow the civil conflict to take its own course – i.e. the secession of Kivu and probably the eventual takeover of the entire country by M23 and its national and regional allies. While this goes counter to international received wisdom, it is probably the only solution.  When Americans leave Iraq, still-simmering ethnic and religious rivalries which have been kept more or less in check during the War will explode.  Either Sunnis or Shias will take over the government, but they will have to fight continuous insurgencies with the most likely outcome being a fractured state with Shia, Sunni, and Kurd maintaining separate geographical regions. The Taliban will win in Afghanistan, will take over the entire country, conclude profitable pacts with Pakistan, and the two failed states will form an unholy alliance, but such alliances are the natural outcome of historical conflict.

This federalism, such as it might be, will not come about easily.  The vast oil wealth of the Kurdish region will certainly come into play, as well as a possible Kurdistan, and wars could easily break out again. Still, this may be the only way to proceed.  Let the international community recede completely and let the combatants duke it out.  If the civil wars become too incompatible with international standards, then perhaps US or European forces will again become involve as was the case in the Serbian and Bosnian wars.

The only thing that Americans and the West care about is the cassiterite and coltan.  As long as cellphone and computer manufacturers have access to these minerals, they could care less who governs.  They might well agree to stand by while the fight for dominance in the region goes on, for who ever wins will surely facilitate the exploitation and sale of minerals, taking big, juicy, bites along the way.

However, we must define ‘international community’.  Rwanda is certainly not about to stand by while Congolese Hutus have not been completely neutralized and that an alliance with M23 can give Kagame a share of the vast mineral wealth.  There is no reason for former combatants like Uganda to sit idly by either.

The most naïve and idealistic statement of all is Pham’s conclusion:

Given the dysfunctional status quo and the terrible toll it has exacted in terms of lives and resources, the West should put aside ideological dogmatism in favor of statesmanlike pragmatism and acknowledge the reality that, at least in some extreme cases, the best way to break a cycle of violence is to break up an artificial country in crisis and give it back to its very real people [italics mine].

If the West lets the conflict take its natural course, one thing is certain – the vast majority of Congolese will not benefit, no more than they have benefited at any time before in their troubled history.  The wealth will be concentrated in a few hands as it always has been.  The Congo will remain poor.  A harsh fact, but a fact nonetheless.