The First Waldorf School

In the chaotic circumstances of post-World War I Germany, Rudolf Steiner had been giving lectures on his ideas for a societal transformation in the direction of independence of the economic, governmental and cultural realms, known as Social Threefolding, to the workers of various factories. On April 23, 1919, he held such a lecture for the workers of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany; in this lecture he mentioned the need for a new kind of comprehensive school. On the following day, the workers approached Herbert Hahn, one of Steiner's close co-workers, and asked him whether their children could be given such a school. Independently of this request, the owner and managing director of the factory, Emil Molt, announced his decision to set up such a school for his factory workers' children to the company's Board of Directors and asked Steiner to be the school's pedagogical consultant. He did this because Rudolf Steiner indicated that the chance for social change in the world was lost at the end of the first World War, because the politicians were determined to hang on to power and the status quo. Steiner indicated that the modern age was the age of the individual and the social order had to change to accommodate this. This was a necessary part of the evolution of mankind and the world. As this was hindered by the politicians who drew up the Treaty of Versailles, Steiner indicated that the only hope for the evolutionary development of the world lay in educating children in a new way, hence the phrase “Education towards Freedom.”

The name Waldorf thus comes from the factory which hosted the first school, but it was originally formed as an independent institution licensed by the local government as an exploratory model school with special freedoms. Steiner specified four conditions:

1. that the school be open to all children;

2. that it be coeducational;

3. that it be a unified twelve-year school;

4. that the teachers, those individuals actually in contact with the children, have primary control over the pedagogy of the school, with a minimum of interference from the state or from economic sources.

On May 13, 1919, Molt, Steiner and E.A. Karl Stockmeyer had a preliminary discussion with the Education Ministry with the aim of finding a legal structure that would allow for an independent school. Stockmeyer was then given the task of finding teachers as a foundation for the future school. At the end of August, seventeen candidates for teaching positions attended what would be the first of many pedagogical courses sponsored by the school; twelve of these candidates were chosen to be the school's first teachers. The school opened on September 7, 1919 with 256 pupils in eight grades; 191 of the pupils were from factory families, the other 65 came from interested families from Stuttgart, many of whom were already engaged in the anthroposophical movement in that city. In the following years, a numerical balance between the factory workers' and outside children was achieved; it had been an explicit goal of the social three-folding movement to create a school that bridged social classes in this way. For the first year, the school was a company school and all teachers were listed as workers at Waldorf-Astoria, by the second year the school had become an independent entity.

The Stuttgart school grew quickly, adding a grade each year of secondary education, which thus by the 1923/4 school year included grades 9-12, and adding parallel classes in all grades. By 1926 there were more than 1,000 pupils in 28 classes. Already, in 1922, Steiner had brought his educational ideas to an English-speaking audience when he delivered twelve lectures at Manchester College at the Oxford Conference on the philosophy and practice of education and the imperative for a moral component. This was followed up in 1924 with a course by Steiner for teachers held at Torquay during Steiner's final visit to Britain.

By 1938, many schools inspired by the original school or its pedagogical principles had been founded in the United States, UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Hungary, and in other towns in Germany. Political interference from the Nazi regime limited and ultimately closed most Waldorf schools in Europe; the affected schools, including the original school, were reopened after the Second World War.