Waldorf News

The Waldorf Teacher: Someone You Can Steal Horses With

By DORIT WINTER

“Teachers are born not made” is an old saw that may have more than a grain of truth in it. In a bygone era, the one I went to high school in, Waldorf teachers were born, not made; teacher training as such did not yet exist.

I graduated from the Rudolf Steiner School of New York in 1964, and was taught by members of what I call the “pantheon” of Waldorf educators in North America. These original high school teachers were original in more ways than one. To us youngsters they all seemed a bit odd. They were definitely not cool. Yet we respected them. We appreciated their oddity. We understood that we were learning from teachers who seemed to be outside the grasp of fads, trends, and popular culture. These were “Teachers.” They taught us. And they did it with great skill, knowledge, power and warmth. This pantheon included among others included Henry and Christy Barnes, Arvia and Karl Ege, Amos Franceschelli.

I met some of them again in my late twenties when I started teaching at that same school. And later still, many were my colleagues at Waldorf conferences and other events. I was amazed at their grip, their steadfastness, their unwavering humanity. Most of them were born teachers; one or two of them had studied Anthroposophy in Europe; at least one of them had visited a teacher training in Germany. But for most teachers at that time, Waldorf teacher training or Waldorf teacher education was unavailable. Instead they learned on the job, through the job, and through their own education and development.

Now, after twenty-one years of being in the business of preparing people to become Waldorf teachers, I know from experience that Waldorf teachers —with rare exceptions—are no longer born. Some of them are born teachers; still, the Waldorf part has to be learned. And what is that Waldorf part? Ah, yes, the airplane conversation test:

“I’m a computer programmer,” says your neighbor on a cross country flight. “You?”
“I’m a …uh… I teach.”
“Teach what?”
“Teach teachers how to teach.”
“Oh?”
Sigh:” I teach teachers how to be Waldorf teachers.”
“Oh, yeah, Waldorf, I’ve heard of that. That’s for (pick one or more):
a) kids with dyslexia b) kids with musical abilities c) little kids d)kids who need art e) rich kids

And now I have to explain Waldorf Education to a well-intentioned inquirer, unacquainted with its assumptions, methods, and goals. How can I do this? And how do I then explain what it is to train a Waldorf teacher? This is a moment on which much depends.

I have to give the same explanations—of Waldorf Education itself and of the essence of the Waldorf teacher training—to my adult students. Many of them, at the outset at least, are also well-intentioned inquirers. What I say has to be almost individual and has to evolve, because it depends on the inquirer. The more nuanced the capacity for discernment in the inquirer, the more nuanced the answer can be. Even after the more or less 1140 hours of class time in our teacher training, the students and I are still working with the questions “What is Waldorf?” and “What exactly are we doing in a Waldorf teacher training?”

In a lecture to the first Waldorf teachers, Rudolf Steiner said: “We must find our way more and more toward our task, which is to make human beings truly human. It sounds simple. But grand and complex questions are raised by this statement. What exactly is “truly human?” Herein lies the key to preparing Waldorf teachers. Their humanity is what has to be developed. That’s all.

What we try to do in the teacher training is what we try to do in the education of the children: develop healthy capacities for thinking, feeling and doing. It’s not a matter of the aspiring teachers being or becoming smart, especially not as measured by the conventional academic yardstick of a good memory and verbal and mathematical skills. It is not a matter of their becoming artists, especially not as gauged by the conventional institutional paradigm of artistic skills. And it is not a matter of their being totally dedicated. The Waldorf class teacher works on behalf of the “truly human” adults the children will become. The teacher of future Waldorf teachers works with adults bound by a life-time of habits, burdened by a hard-won identity which often requires adjustment, and eager to enter the classroom with a notebook of Waldorf techniques.

Alas, there are no Waldorf techniques! First one has to learn how to think, and it is not an easy matter. Steiner uses the phrase “morphological thinking,” meaning a type of thinking that can illuminate our own confusions, can cut through the appearance of things to their source. Logic is only a part of this sort of thinking. It is not a cold, abstract, formulaic thinking. Yet it is not formless and chaotic either. It is the kind of thinking that actually solves life’s problems. Steiner began to develop his own capacity for this kind of thinking when, at age nine, he encountered geometry, and discovered a world in which lawful thinking could be “seen.”

The teacher training I direct is a three- year program involving weekends and summer weeks. Usually it isn’t until the second year that the students can cope with the idea that feeling can become an organ of cognition, can perceive and understand things without sentimentality. The idea that feeling can be objective sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it is this capacity for an objective feeling life that allows one to be a Waldorf class teacher.

A Waldorf teacher should love his or her students, but not in the way a parent loves a child. The goal of the Waldorf teacher is to allow the child to grow into him or herself. The teacher must not stand in the way of the child’s development. The teacher must not create a little replica of herself. The teacher must not like one aspect of the child, and neglect everything else.

It’s an interesting that psychoanalysis focuses on parents, not on teachers. That may be because teachers are not hard-wired to identify with the children. Even so, teachers need to learn to see the children for what the children are, not what they seem to be through the teacher’s biographically tinted glasses. A teacher cannot use the classroom to come to terms with her own stories. A teacher cannot use the children at all. The teacher must have a truly free relationship to them. This means: love them, but never depend on them for one’s own well-being.

Thus it is important that the Waldorf teacher-to-be acquire self-knowledge and emotional independence. Art classes contribute to our adult students’ growing self-knowledge. When you see that the clay is what you made it, that the painting is what you made it, that you are what you are in a eurythmy class, that you seem to have the same issues in every class, then it is harder to avoid the realization that you are less balanced than you thought you were. As one student wrote in a self-evaluation after a summer intensive session, “I was sick of running into myself everywhere I went.” This same student also wrote: “I’ve made some personal breakthroughs.”

The necessary degree of independence requires inner work, and it is this inner work which Waldorf teacher training can provide, first and foremost. This continual inner growth is the essential ingredient of the Waldorf teacher paradigm and it is what distinguishes us.

Many people start the teacher training with great hesitation. They’ve been told that they aren’t very talented, aren’t very smart. That’s the message their own education has given them. Slowly, as their study of Steiner’s works progresses, they find that they do have the capacity to think, and to trust themselves; they discover that the feelings which brought them into the teacher training are reliable; and their sense of who they are and what they can accomplish changes.

Quite often the people with the least academic proficiency are the least damaged in their will forces, in their ability to take initiative and to act in the world. They never had the patience to learn about the world at one or two or three removes, but they were in the world as mechanics, social workers, nannies, forest rangers, fire fighters and the like. Such people often have the most potential to become wonderful teachers. Children know when they are looking at people who can manage in the world. Children know who’s reliable, whether a teacher is someone they can “steal horses with” as the proverb has it. If teacher training students have a bit of rascal in themselves, they have mustered the first pre-requisite for Waldorf teaching: not to be a pedant.

So a Waldorf teacher training is a cauldron for self-development. In Waldorf Education, the most important ingredient is the teacher. The teacher should exemplify the humanity that is the goal for each child. Enabling the teacher to make that goal a life-long path of learning is the goal of Waldorf teacher training.

Dorit Winter
Director, Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training, bacwtt.org