What’s the advantage of being in a country as far away as Argentina? It forces people to be creative. There’s also the distance in time: it’s now 100 years since the Waldorf school was founded. It’s a treasure we’ve been given. We can hide this treasure and return it stagnant, or we can make it more fertile so that it grows into something greater than what we received.
How can we keep the Waldorf movement alive and fruitful today, in any context? Maintaining something means “preserving”, but the movement needs constant interaction with the world around it, which is constantly transforming and being transformed. What do we need to preserve and what do we need to transform in order to keep the anthroposophical impulse alive? The spiritual impulse must remain spiritual; it cannot change. Historical and cultural conditions, on the other hand, are no longer the same.
For all children
We see Rudolf Steiner’s creative gesture in 1919, when he was active from the social situation of the time. This gesture must be nurtured and preserved. And yet, if we only imitate the first Waldorf school, we would end up becoming pale copies. In adopting this creative gesture, we must, according to Rudolf Steiner, engage in a dialog with the current legality, the academic world and social reality.
The first Waldorf school was founded for children of workers; today we don’t necessarily find children of workers in Waldorf schools. We have to make sure that the improvement of the Waldorf School does not take place in a closed environment and that the spiritual impulse can become fertile for any child.
In our work with Waldorf Education in Argentina, we have three Achilles’ heels: in the cultural sphere, our internal language was not adapted to scientific discourse; in our relationship with the authorities, we had to continually ask for legal exceptions in order to maintain our educational freedom; in the social sphere, we focused for decades on a particular group – privileged and homogeneous – and consequently neglected other groups in the country. Basically, we didn’t follow the impulse of tripartition in the three spheres of society.
Adapting to the conditions
We tried to establish contacts with the authorities and look at teacher training programs with the intention of supplementing them with anthroposophical views so that they would be available to any teacher. For example, we don’t insist on not teaching Geometry to very young children because it’s too intellectual, but if the government demands that we do it, then we do it by adapting it to the child’s age.
Young teachers and teachers in training at our officially recognized institute are motivated to work from anthroposophy. They don’t find ideal situations but have to deal with the challenges they encounter and adapt their work to each situation. With this approach we hope to be able to break out of the niche of alternative education – because that is a niche of self-defense, where the treasures end up being protected from any contamination: a dangerous place of purity, perfection and stagnation.
When we give this treasure away as a gift, it will not be diluted, but will become the seed of cultural change and transformation. Studying and internalizing anthroposophy is not a goal but the foundation. The goal is in the future – and the future is somewhere in the world.
Alejandro Ranovsky is an elementary school teacher, researcher and trainer in secondary education and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. He is co-founder of the Perito Moreno Teacher Training Institute, where he also provides training.
In Anthroposophy Worldwide, 5/2019, translated by Leonor Malik
