Been needing a thread on this.
Turns out that Nora Brinker, who I know from her posts exposing David Yeagley, attended a Waldorf School herself and so knows firsthand what they teach. She just recently left this comment at my site after someone defended Steiner as not being racist.
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The_Editrix has left a new comment on your post ""Heil Mein Fuhrer": Yeagley's Delusions of Himself...":
I attended a Rudolf Steiner school in Germany from second class to "Abitur" (university entrance exams). What you are saying is preposterous.
A quote from the mother of a former Waldorf pupil (2000):
"In my opinion the children are clearly exposed to racist thought. It's subtle and done in such a way that the parents don't necessarily notice right away. We didn't notice either, because I never looked at their school materials that closely, because the children never got much homework. They I finally did look at the materials and I was really shocked."
"Recent fifth-grade history workbooks from different Waldorf schools. We discover teaching about human development unknown in the history lessons of public schools. The Aryans, Waldorf curriculum declares, left the sinking continent of Atlantic to found many high cultures. Terms like "Aryan," "sacrificial fire" (Opferfeuer) and "Aryan wanderings" are used without comment."
"Outside observers may see only the teaching of a little-known myth. Experts see it differently. The contents of the workbooks show, they say, that the children are being taught mythology as historical fact and that a development theory placing special emphasis on Aryans is pedagogically untenable."
Although this woman's child has probably attended a Steiner school decades after I left, and a different school as well, it describes what I experienced to a "T".
Chance?
A few quotes from The Master Himself?
Steiner taught that there was a hierarchy of racial virtue with Negroid peoples and Jews at the bottom and blue-eyed, blonde "Aryans" at the top. He even saw a direct correlation between blonde hair and intelligence.
"You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish." [1922]
"We are within the great Root Race of humanity, which has peopled the earth, since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race. The first Sub-Race lived in the distant past in Ancient India" [1905]
Steiner taught that the Black/Negroid races were "children" and incapable of development beyond a relatively primitive level, that Asians were "adolescent" and mainly capable of imitation, but lacked the true creativity of the European race, that blonde, blue-eyed Europeans were the "adult" race, the ultimate in intelligence and creative power. He also taught that the American Indian was "degenerate" and stood for decay and old age of mankind. He saw Indians as a race representing the ancient past and having become weak. He also taught that American Indians had once been Negroes whose colour has faded to coppery red.
"[W]e are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. The savages have developed into what they now are--with their superstitions, their magical practices and their unclean appearance--from states originally more perfect. The only superiority we have over them is that, while starting from the same conditions, we did not degenerate as they did. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. Mankind, though to begin with it looked more animal-like, was highly civilized. ... Just as the present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower." (Steiner, 1924, EEM p. 126)
"When Negroes go to the west, they cannot absorb as much light and heat any more as they were used to in their Africa. (...) That is why they turn copper red, they become Indians. That is because they are forced to reflect a part of the light and heat. They turn shiny copper red. They cannot keep up this copper red shining. That is why the Indians die out in the West, they die because of their own nature which does not get enough light and heat, they die because of the earthly factor.(...)"
'Indians died because of their own nature.."
Old stuff?
In 1985, one of Steiner's acolytes, the Dutch Frank Wijnbergh, made the following statements at two lectures under the auspices of the Anthroposophical Study Center.
"And you may see that the Indian race started to behave in a very definite way. I mean, they acquiesced. Then, the white race is unfriendly enough to speed up this process by exterminating them. This is something which occurs again and again in history. At the moment when an impulse is not strong enough any more, and out of place, then there will always be other nations and influences to finish them off (...) That is a law!
Not all human beings who are living today are on the same level of the development of humanity. Besides the nations, who are on a high cultural level, there are primitive people who have lagged far behind culturally. (....) let us name as an example those nations who became known when America was discovered. (...)
We have found the American race as a primitive primordial people, which has remained far, far behind. They lag behind in religious views as well. (...) However, the Europeans have risen to a higher cultural level, while the Indians have remained static, and therefore they have become decadent."
Quotes and further material can be found here
http://www.waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/waldorf_salad.html or here
http://www.waldorfcritics.org/ if that didn't suffice.
