Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Waldorf Education in North America:The Curriculum and the Folk SpiritbyNorman DavidsonOn a cold morning in March 1996, I went out into my backyard at 4:30under the clear, dark skies pinpricked with stars to see the comet Hyakutake.Binoculars revealed it glowing quietly in Libra. It is a strange experience forsomeone who knows the patterns of the stars to see such a ghostly patch ofmilky white adding itself to the familiar form of a constellation. Here was anunexpected visitor from beyond the planetary system. There was somethinguniversal about it, something beyond our personal sky. It was as if it hailed,perhaps, from the realm of the fabled Seraphim—from behind the starsthemselves. These cometary phenomena announce themselves openly, evenboldly, across our skies—yet physically they are of homeopathic proportion.They have but a small, hard core, and their glowing tails, while externallyimmense, are made up of tenuous, hardly existent matter.Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy, has some cometary qualities.Rather than arising out of a purely “natural” (or “matter of course”) seriesof events, it arrives as an unexpected cultural visitor that points in the directionof the universal and the free, teaching something beyond the ordinaryphysical realm. Although it enters fully and dramatically onto the modernscene, it comes from afar and as a much-needed presence. Waldorf Education—anoffspring of Spiritual Science—also is a kind of comet that hasentered the “skies” of North American culture.Rudolf Steiner gave to Ralph Courtney—one of the pioneers of Anthroposophyin North America—a verse that I believe was not just for theearly anthroposophical community in Spring Valley, New York, but wasaddressed to the American spirit in general. It speaks of the inward uniting272