Waldorf News

Sages Disguised as Melon Growers

By Teddy Macker

Often when I talk to parents interested in our school they ask about our alums. Even if they’re parents of three-year-olds they want to hear about “how the students integrate into high school.” Underneath this question I detect not just understandable parental concern but also an unnerving demand.

These parents want me to list “success stories,” assuring them our students have made their way, without ripple, into the mainstream, joining the Rosters of the Eminent. And that thusly, should they join our school, their children will, too.

I hate assuring them of such things. First, I don’t know what’s in store for any of us. Second, I came to this education—like many before me—to flee such a Procrustean outlook. Third, I know that by recounting such success stories I’m feeding, to invoke a Native American wisdom, the wrong wolf.

How tempting to respond to them cryptically and poetically! How delicious it would be to hurl at them some Rilke and say the best of our alums are now in the open country, roving the wide ways, living lives of barefoot wanderings on soft grass, deep breathing, listening, silence, amid the hush of evening…

On Waldorf school websites, in Waldorf publications, and in videos about Waldorf education one often learns about the successes of the alumni. And what are these successes? Usually advanced degrees, awards, and “high-profile” jobs (lawyer, professor, actress, CEO). External, tangible, showable success. Success du jour.

Such “messaging” is common these days. But is this messaging in keeping with Rudolf Steiner’s intention or merely a pandering reflex to an unwell time? Are we expediently rattling off such accolades to bolster flailing enrollment? Are we ill-at-ease as an alternative education and overly desirous of the embrace of the establishment? And with such ideas of success rife in the atmosphere our children inhabit, are we really “protecting childhood”? Are we really receiving them in reverence, educating them in love, and letting them go forth in freedom? Or are we actually putting them in chains, the chains of what the French call the hallucination publicitaire? And what if—taking a few giant steps back, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole—emphasis on individual success of any kind is pernicious? What if “success” is not what our children and the world need now?

Dolores LaChapelle, in her vital but largely forgotten book, Rapture of the Deep, limns a primary struggle of today’s children. She writes that in the first stage of development it is absolutely necessary that children acquire a sense of “Basic Trust.” At its deepest level, this Basic Trust, “includes confidence that you will become part of the story” (my emphasis added).

What does it mean to “become part of the story”?

LaChappelle would say it means working towards a harmony with Mother Earth. Thich Nhat Hanh and Charles Eisenstein would say it means moving beyond a Story of Separation into a Story of Interbeing. Christ might invoke the Kingdom of God. Lao Tzu, the Dao. The Lakota, Wakan Tanka: the Great Mystery. Jews might speak of Tikkun Olam: World Repair.

At Waldorf schools we endeavor to help our children become part of the Story of Interbeing and World Repair. But have we seen our noble mission statements nullified, or at least partly undermined, by an unspoken master, namely our harmful vision of success? In Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk asks, “What are many little lives if the life of those lives be gone?” Are we in the Waldorf community remembering “the life”?

Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton had this impish and stark advice for students: “Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

In Earth in Mind, one of the great books on education in our time, David Orr echoes Merton: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more ‘successful’ people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.”

I have yet to read an alum profile that runs something like this: “Tim Steele, class of 2004, is a stay-at-home dad living a life of compassion. He loves to make jam.” Or: “Cynthia Cruz realized her vocation is showing up for lonely friends.” Or: “Robert Chang dropped out of law school, moved to New Zealand where he busks and draws, and is daily recalling the truth of his soul’s interior abundance.”

We might laugh at the idea of such profiles on our websites. Indeed we might think such profiles batty. But perhaps that is to our detriment. Perhaps it is we who are batty.

Robert Bly argues that what sustained Thoreau during his many years of layabout, sometimes ignominious gestation was “the truth of the soul’s interior abundance.” Bly elaborates: “The world scorns football players who make no yardage, writers who do not publish, fishermen who catch no fish. But this soul truth, which young people, when lucky, pick up from somewhere…sustains them. If the world doesn’t feed them, they receive some nourishment from this truth. The substance of the truth goes to their paws, and they live through the winter of scorn and despicability in the way hibernating bears were once thought to live, by sucking their own paws.”

In May of 1991, Gary Snyder—giving the commencement address at his alma mater, Reed College—said:

“I propose that we take note of the locals as well as the universals, pay as much attention to the community as we do to the National State, keep looking for the questions rather than the answers, walk more and drive less, and follow our own integral concepts of whatever a good and productive life might be, rather than some mainstream image.

As Robinson Jeffers wrote, ‘corruption never has been compulsory.’

From my own vantage point I can say that some of the finest people who ever graduated from Reed are not famously successful.

A few that I know quite well have been lost to the Alumni Association for decades, but they live exemplary lives and do needed and innovative work in the everyday world, with no more frustration and often more sense of accomplishment than those on the Rosters of the Eminent.

They are, as a Taoist poet put it, ‘Sages disguised as melon-growers in the mountains.'”

Deep down we know there’s more to education and parenting than churning out the “famously successful” listed on the “Rosters of the Eminent.” That wish is the ego’s wish, the smaller self’s, the self that is fed (overfed) by our fractured time. And that wish is aiding and abetting business-as-usual, which is harming our children and world.

No doubt, some Waldorf alums are bound for the limelight, to become well-known and accoladed (and to be sure, often these alums are doing beautiful, life-serving work); but those destined for quieter lives are no less worthy or exemplary: these are the sages disguised as melon-growers.

Long may they tend Mother Earth. Long may they repair our world. Long may they live part of a bigger story.

I conclude with beautiful words by Irish poet-philosopher John Moriarty (words that sound like they could’ve been penned by Rudolf Steiner):

We must follow the star.
Even on godless nights
When there is no star
We must follow the star.

Teddy Macker served as the administrator at The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara for two years and now oversees communication, outreach, and facilities at the same school. Teddy has taught at many schools at various levels, spending eighteen years in the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara where he taught literature. The author of the collection of poetry, This World (White Cloud Press, 2015; foreword by Brother David Steindl-Rast), Teddy publishes his writings — essays, short stories, poems, and translations — widely. He lives on a farm in Carpinteria, California with his wife and children where he maintains an orchard.

Teddy can be reached at teddy@waldorfsantabarbara.org.