Positive Aspects to Attending a Rudolph Steiner School, for what it does in later life, for both sexes
Having attended Michael Hall Rudolph Steiner School in Forest Row, Sussex as a young pupil riding the rail from Oxted, Surrey, or riding the cattle truck bus to school from East Grinstead, I came to the following conclusions about Rudolph Steiner education in the 60's and 70's.
Rudolph Steiner was a 33 degree Freemason, I found out much later in life. Obviously, novice masons who make it up to master mason in their local lodge, don't encounter what is on the upper levels of 33 degree Freemasonry.
Back to the subject of Rudolph Steiner education.
Some of the positive aspects are the following:
1) Boys and girls both attended needlework classes. This is not what you would think it would be initially. Boys and girls could actually make denim shirts, denim jackets and denim jeans from 22 ounce de-niems, which is French for sail cloth, unlike the 12 ounce and 14 ounce, and if you are extremely lucky 16 ounce denim that you get in Levi jeans today, which is utter crap compared to the old jeans that you could stand up in the corner when you took them off when they were new. These used to be called shrink to fits, the original 501's, not the convoluted obstruse nonsense that clouds the minds of many today.
Boys had the benefit of learning how to sew, use a Singer sewing machine by hand, or treadle, or with an electric motor and make their own clothes, and learn how to knit, crochet, and a vast array of seamstress techniques. Let it be known that some of the best suit makers, who will make you a custom made suit, are actually geezers (blokes to you) who are fantastic tailors, who started off in the needlework class.
The girls obviously loved this, and were also fascinated at the blokes being able to get it together as well in the same classroom at that time.
2) Boys and girls both attend carpentry shop education, learning how to make toys, go-carts, shelves, box sash windows, and not from a kit that was supplied by Wal-Mart or B & Q, or Sears Roebuck Vending. The things you can do with Wood are endless, and some of us even realised that making a Les Paul standard was possible, if you had Honduras mahogany and a bookmatched maple top, and a holly veneer for the headstock, after having made a simple Strat or Telecaster copy from scratch, with whatever parts you could find kicking around from Watkins Rapier 33 or Antoria guitars or CSL or such like at this time, to go with your WEM tube amp, or Selmer treble and bass 50, or Impact 60 watt, or such amps from the period.
3) Girls and boys attended metalwork, initially making copper kettles, and copper cooking utensils, progressing onto gas welding and arc welding, and CO2 welding, and TIG welding, cutting, grinding, milling and machining, and general lathe work. Obviously, the girls began to think about making a chopper out of a 250 cc twin, or customising a three wheeler Reliant, or motorcycle combinations.
Meeting Rudolph Steiner girls from Sussex later on in life, the first thing you are hit by is, that they are sorting their own furniture out, shelving, putting a clutch in a car or changing the brake pads and shoes, or pulling a cylinder head and taking it down the machine shop.
Meeting Rudolph Steiner guys, you realise that they are doing all these things also, plus sorting their clothes out, learning how to cook, make bread, flapjacks, pastries, different cooking arts from around the world, and whatever else they learned from attending the girls classes and cookery and clothes making, and whatever else they could get themselves into.
So, the first thing you realise is, when you are a young student, is the question that you pop to a senior, "Can I come down and do something? Can I get on board, can I be getting on with something, can I get into it somehow, some way, like now, like right now, like yesterday or last week?"
The Negative Aspects
There were appalling downsides to the Rudolph Steiner education at this time frame. I came from a preparatory school that was geared up to a grammar school entrance, and my parents decided to take a different strange turning, and negotiated a bursary grant for me and my brother, having come from a poor background. So I found myself at 7 years of age at Rudolph Steiner school, and rattling off my times table, when the kids were only just doing their 2 x 2 tables, so kids like me coming from a high pressure preparatory school academia environment, are suddenly confronted with the wishy-washy spaced out, academically failing, and goofing off approach of early education in a Rudolph Steiner school, which makes the kids very sluggish without clear direction, clear goals, clear targets, administrative chart/admin scale, or complete lack of it that doesn't align with anything, so the gifted children that enter this nightmare, can't find anything to do with their active minds, while the rest of the Rudolph Steiner sheep in the class gently meander their way through putting a yellow wash on a piece of paper, and then start drawing crayons on it, to encourage their spiritual enlightenment or what have you, while you want to wrestle with much more meaty subjects, rather than become apathetic, atrophy, lethargy, and general gormlosity, while some Steineroid slowly regurgitates their poorly-learnt concepts and datums onto bright young minds that are itching and raring to go.
Academically, at this time, this school should have been shut down without question. The Americans that took over the management of the school at this time, must have had to come to a private arrangement with the Ofsted school inspectors, to keep the school going, in the light of its appalling academic failings and should in truth have been shut down at this time, for not delivering, and severely duping the clientele. I have been back a few times to class reunions, and from what I can see I don't think things have improved much. It's the moneyed middle class, that want their children to have an interesting education in some other form of "educational model". The parents are "handled" by the staff and seniors, when attending events, in order to present a very favourable impression to the new publics that are thinking of bringing their children to this type of education, so the initial milking patterns are set up, all based on extracting vast amounts of money, because it had become all about the money. The sad thing is, once the kids are ensconced, the academia was appallingly handled, giving priority to artistic and spiritual activities, like eurythmy developed by Rudolph Steiner and Marie Von Sivers, which is very good for your co-ordination, but was over beleaguered by great big long periods like a whole afternoon devoted to eurythmy several times a week, and wash painting with sponges and paints in the mornings, which is hardly going to get you through to having a focused mind to do your O and A levels later on, having developed bad habits, from not having a focused education, with clear set goals that are delineated, which is entirely unlike what Rudolph Steiner had set up initially, with clear goals and instructions, and methods, with books to back up the theory and practical of it all, but turning into something else entirely later on, where even the books weren't available to students to study actually what they were involved in. The middle class parents were susceptible to being duped thuswise in order to hand over the vast fees, and term fees required for doing this education. Maybe it was the American management that took over this particular school, that turned it into this particular scenario at that time.
Lots of love,
Mark Percy