Rudolf Steiner

i mean i get the sense that the schools themselves are somewhat controversial but what about the man himself?

i went to one of the schools from about age 4-10 and my cousins went there right up to 18. basically, the philosophy was that you let kids develop their own interests. you don't really have subject teaching early on. you just have 'main lessons' which could be about anything from the natural setting the school is in (in my case rural sussex) to history of the teacher's choosing. in my experience, was an absolutely lovely way to grow up eary on, but most kids who go there and take formal qualifications don't do that well, cos it's not what it's geared towards. you also do obligatory stuff like something called 'eurhytmy' which is a kinda yoga/dance/relaxation mixture... it is all fairly hippyish, but in quite a straight-laced, po-faced way. of the village we lived in, my mum was the only 'steiner mother' scandalous enough to allow a television! other kids used to press their faces up against our window when their partents weren't looking..

I'm very interested in Steiner but he can be a bit too far out at times eg when he starts talking about the presence of salt on the moon in the first post-atlantean epoch, or when he starts telling us that gnomes don't have a very high opinion of human intelligence.

But he's a good counterbalance to arcane, obscurantist occultism because he offers practical advice on how to develop latent clairvoyant powers eg How to Know Higher Worlds. He does appear to take a very scientific approach to the exploration of spiritual realms, hence the "po-faced" element to the steiner schools, and the "hippyish" content of their (scientifically proveable, they would argue) beliefs.

there is this thread too:

Does anyone have any first-hand experience of Steiner (Waldorf) schools?

and no offense, j.d., cuz i know that you were asking here for info, but if you type *rudolph steiner* into google you get like 40,000 pages on him. Lots and lots of info on the web.

Ho hum, I see that I wrote some stuff on that other thread about my experience of a Steiner education, so I won't here. I know very little about him as a thinker, really.

yeah, thanks scott - i realized after i posted this thread that it came off a little "can you help me with my research paper?"-ish. i've gotten through a couple of the essays, i'll post my thoughts on them before long.