Toward Wholeness

...That comprehensive polarity, together with the subordinate polarities it entails, is moreover not only the energizing source of her utterance...

...Meditating on this lesson, she came to realize that man himself, any man or woman, is not simply a separable part or cog in a machine called nature, but a microcosm within a macrocosm...

...But it is the fact that she thinks and writes primarily as an artist, notably a potter in clay, together with her philosophy of art, that makes a success of this courageously (some will no doubt say audaciously) inextricable combination amounting to synthesis of the two opposite poles of self and world...

...it is also its subject matter...

...Owen Barfield IT HAS EVER been my opinion," wrote Coleridge in one of his essays, "that an excessive solicitude to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun more often has its source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion...

...Centering clay on the potter's wheel taught me how to feel the whole in every part...

...And it is from that rooted conviction that all her work and enthusiasm flows...

...The reader must be given some account of both poles, and the "I" which outcrops in many an anecdote and reminiscence is disinfected of egotism because the writer is obviously interested in it less as being her own than as an example - and the example she naturally knows best - of any microcosm...

...The clay turns like an un-wobbling pivot, fat and wise and wet, like a baby Buddha...

...In its movement westward, Waldorf education finds a growing number of Americans who greet it like an old friend and who take on responsibility for new schools and new ideas...

...Spiritual science requires the union of inner perception (spiritual) and objectivity (science...

...Conversely, when there s a good deal of "I" in a book, it does not necessarily imply a failure to achieve the requisite measure of self-oblivion...

...Americans tend to be impressed by imports and are sometimes slow in maturing their own sense of authority...

...How admirable it is that an American, with precisely this background experience, should have eschewed the vaguenesses of a 'holistic breakthrough,' a 'new age consciousness,' a 'human potentials movement,' an 'Aquarian epoch,' and concentrated on the actual growing point for the future, the place where the 'territory of inferiority' is not merely talked about but opened up and systematically explored, and its priceless contents quarried for use in a quickening renewal of such barren fields as twentieth century education...

...The Steiner Schools, sixty years old, are the strongest growing movement in independent schools in the Western world...

...Richards, Centering, The Crossing Point, and now Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America...

...and she becomes appropriately personal when she tells us how she experienced it as a fact before she accepted it as a theory...

...It is the very being of man, and of universe...

...A critic or a philosopher desirous of sermonizing on the issue might do worse than take for his text the books of M.C...

...American teachers often study abroad, in Switzerland, England, or Germany...

...There is a flavor to Anthroposophy and its arts which seems odd to many Americans...

...This is not intellectual science, but spiritual science, whole and living...

...We don't have words like that in English, words that are formed by putting two different ideas together in a way that makes a new, third idea...

...crowbar herself...

...If that is true, it is because they have sought to rely, not on abstract pedagogical theories but on the concrete findings of Steiner's spiritual science: "Spiritual science" is the translation of the German word "Geisteswis-senschaft...

...In this instance "knowledge" (Wis-senschaft) is moved into union with "spirit" (Geist...

...The qualities of moisture, plasticity, and color are distributed throughout the body of the clay in an even grain...

...The third strand in Toward Wholeness, plaited in with the personal experience and the philosophy, is an informative account of the ideals that inspire the teachers in Rudolf Steiner schools, or Waldorf schools as they are also called, and the training that enables them at least in some measure to realize those ideals, together with a directory of some fifty such schools, institutions, and education centers and a description of the work done in some of them including those for maladjusted or badly handicapped children...

...Richards reverts to this again...

...It depends on the contexts in which the little word is introduced...

...Many of the teachers are German or British...

...If the 'holism' (as it is now fashionable to call it) which she professes in common with Coleridge, Goethe, and Rudolf Steiner, can be seen to be true of reality as a whole, that structural principle is perhaps most self-evidently true in the realm of artistic creation...

...As the movement grows, and more Americans become involved, this will change...

...She is aware of the obstacles, and that it will take many cooperating crowbars to remove them...

...It is not a tool...

...It is characteristic of her method that on the one hand she flings the net of her reflections very wide indeed, no less wide in fact than the universe in space and time, let alone the evolution of human consciousness, while on the other hand these reflections are interspersed, or rather interfused, with highly personal accounts of her own experiences as an artist, as a teacher, and finally as a human being...

...Spirit" is different from "intellect...

...But if she is right in the paramount importance she attaches to the further growth of Waldorf education, she should feel some satisfaction in having provided for the English-speaking world one very serviceable crowbar herself...

...The author is aware of the obstacles in the way of further expansion, though she is sure it must come: Rudolph Steiner education is a cultural import...

...Hands bring the spinning ball of clay into equilibrium, by squeezing it first up into a cone, and then flattening it into a disk, repeating this rhythmically until there are no pockets of wetness, no hard lumps, no air bubbles...

...Spirit uses intellect and goes beyond it...

...It is the principle that in any living organism, whether sensible or supersensible, the whole is antecedent to its parts and is moreover potentially present in each part...