Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
learn wood turnery. The candlesticks, lamps, wooden dolls and animals, lanterns,
bookmarks, letter openers, and puzzles the children produced added a small but
not insignificant contribution to the support of the communal life.
Agreeing with the seventeenth-century religious philosopher and scientist
Blaise Pascal, Eberhard asserted that an interrelationship existed between all
school subjects. It must be possible “to trace the uniting spirit of the creation and
of the new creation” in all subjects –from mathematics to music, from languages to
sports. 10 The children should grasp “the coherence of nature and the coherence of
mankind, the unity and communal characer of all life.” 11 This was also Eberhard’s
remedy for tiresome repetition. “Instead of amassing facts and learning them by
rote, the underlying sense of coherence between the facts will be shown…Here
there will be no attempt to reach what is spiritual by way of what is material, but
the material will be understood through the spiritual.” 12
The success of an educational method – or of an educator – may best be
determined by the students who have experienced the particular type of education.
Take Rudi Hildel, for example. He remembers coming to Sannerz in May of
1927 as an apprehensive seven-year-old: “I had been in two orphanages and was
deserately unhappy at coming to a third. But within the very first days I felt
completely at home. Eberhard was rather tall and he made a great impression on
us children. But I never felt afraid of him.”
“Eberhardwasveryfatherly.Hehadrealauthoritybutneverforcedusintoanything,”
recalls Lotti Magee, who was seven years old when she and her mother came to the
Rhön Bruderhof in 1931. “I was never afraid of him, for I simply felt that a great love
was at work in him. If he ever gave us a row – and he could certainly raise his voice
at times – we knew we deserved it. But then the issue was cleared up and we felt
free. I always had the feeling that he could see into my heart.” 13
This illustrates the most distinctive characeristic in Eberhard’s ideas of
education. He had rediscovered the “untouchable” quality of the child. 14 In this
resect his teacher was neither the innovative educator Pesalozzi, nor the father
of the kindergarten, Fröbel, 15 but Jesus of Nazareth, who said: “If anyone leads
one of these little children astray, so that he can no longer be childlike, it would be
better for that man to be drowned with a millstone around his neck.” And: “Be
careful that you never despise a single one of these little ones, for I tell you that
their angels always come into the Father’s presence.”
Eberhard had read these words of Jesus with breathtaking earnestness. At the
age of forty-five, with an almost grown-up daughter, two half-grown sons, and
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