Abstract
Steiner considered the free unfoldment of individuality to be the essential task of education. This requires more freedom from state rules and regulations than is the case for schools in most modern societies. Its creative nature makes education part of cultural life; it does not belong to the state or government organisation. Government organisation and cultural life are, or should be, two relatively independent realms of society; the third realm is economy. These three social realms should be based on the three social values we have inherited from the French revolution: equality in the state, freedom in culture and solidarity in economy. This is the basic view of Steiner’s so-called social threefoldness. Steiner saw cultural life in general, and education in particular, as disempowered by the penetration of state and economy. Parallels to this view can be found in present-day social and political philosophy, such as that of Habermas and Cohen & Arato, where the cultural lifeworld and civil society are understood as illegitimately colonised by state and economic power, and in need of greater autonomy in order to liberate human creative forces. However, international agencies like the OECD have further increased the political influence of the state on education, eroding the professional knowledge base of teachers and turning them more into bureaucrats than creative artists.
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Notes
- 1.
This is obvious when looking at the history of Eastern societies, and it is still largely the case today, even though in China the bizarre mixture of state or semi-state capitalism and communist ideology (a form of cultural power) is almost overreaching itself (cf. Walter and Howie 2012). The worship of Chairman Mao was obviously in form not very different from that of the Divine Emperors in earlier history.
- 2.
The author, Fritz Breithaupt, is professor of Germanistics at the Indiana University, US.
- 3.
This book consists of a selection of lectures from GA 192, 296 and 330-31. They deal extensively with the educational aspects of social threefoldness.
- 4.
Among the people that Steiner contacted were Richard von Kühlmann (German minister of Foreign Affairs), Arthur Polzer-Hoditz (counsellor to the Austrian emperor), Maximilan von Baden (cousin of the German emperor Wilhelm II) and Wilhelm von Blume (professor of State Law) (Kühn 1978; Lindenberg 1997).
- 5.
As will soon be clear, Steiner did not mean that the state should own the means of production and be an employer of workers. He rather envisaged economical life as organised on the cooperative principle: that consumers and producers unite in associations based on solidarity. As for the means of production, he suggested the right of use to replace the right of ownership. This requires the economic sphere to be transformed from a capitalist profit economy to an economy of solidarity, so that human individuality can flourish also in this field of life. According to Steiner, we make a big mistake by linking wages to work, since this inevitably turns human capacities into commodities. Consequently, the human being also becomes a commodity (here Steiner agrees with Marx, although he never refers to him in this context). But all human beings have the right to the economic means for fulfilling their basic needs, whether they are employed or not. Although Steiner never said so explicitly, the necessary consequence seems to be that a basic income must be guaranteed for all—an idea that has grown stronger in recent times (cf. Van Parijs 2001).
- 6.
As Habermas (1992) argues, nationalism could be fruitfully replaced by ‘constitutional patriotism’.
- 7.
In 1919–1920, Steiner and some of his followers did extensive public lecturing on the ideas of the threefold social order (published in GA 328-334). Steiner’s lectures were rather popular, particularly in Württemberg, where they were often overfull, and they were reviewed in the daily press (Kühn 1978). Nevertheless, the movement for a threefold social order never became as large and influential as Steiner hoped for. Apart from criticisms, fabricated and false allegations were often published in the press, which made Steiner talk about ‘factories of forged letters’ that were sent to newspaper editors as ‘authentic information’ (1992 [GA 196], p. 83)—the machinations of fake news were operating already at that time.
- 8.
It may be noted in passing that the view of society as threefolded goes a long way back. In ancient times, there were three types of gods perceived as ruling the three basic social functions of power/wisdom, production/fertility and war (sic!) (the latter was then more an aspect of culture than of power) (see further Dahlin 2006). In the seventieth century, Comenius also envisioned a threefold division of society. He named the three spheres religion, culture and politics/economy (Blekastad 1977). They should be organised as three relatively independent realms although every citizen partakes in a natural way in all three spheres. This was an important step in the historical development of conceptions of the social order. In older times, the individual was understood as belonging to only one of the three realms, like in Plato, or the Hindu caste system. Comenius also suggested that the three realms should be organised transnationally and separately, in a World Council of Churches including all religions; a ‘Collegium Lucis’ for the cultural life of the whole world (an idea that inspired the creation of UNESCO); and a supranational court of justice for political conflicts. These worldwide institutions should be based upon three principal values: that of the equal value of all souls in the religious and juridical sphere; the principle of the freedom of spirit within the cultural sphere; and the principle of brotherhood in the sphere of politics and economics (Comenius’ conception of politics seems rather simplistic, and his distinction between religion and culture is a bit hard to accept from a modern point of view).
- 9.
See also Monbiot (2001) for a powerful analysis of the corporate aspect of a modern capitalist state. Among other things, Monbiot recounts how education came to be viewed as ‘a market opportunity’ (p. 331).
- 10.
Steiner (1997; p. 151) characterised the history of Western society since ancient times as moving from a ‘priestly tyranny’—a kind of cultural tyranny illustrated by the power of the church in the Middle Ages—over state or political tyranny beginning with the consolidation of the national state in the sixteenth–seventieth century, and moving more and more into economic tyranny, with the development of industrial capitalism at the end of the ninetieth century.
- 11.
As Burrow (1993) remarks, Humboldt is perhaps the first political thinker to point out the risk that citizens become more passive the more the state caters for their needs. Thereby he anticipates the kind of critique of the welfare state which holds that it turns its citizens into clients. Humboldt’s ideas about limiting the influence and the commitments of the state can at first glance seem identical to the liberal notion of a ‘night watch state’. It is, however, hard to equate Humboldt’s political ideas with such an extreme liberalism, because his ideal society also has some socialist aspects (ibid., p xlix–l).
- 12.
This does not mean that there should be no laws at all governing schools and education. But these laws should focus on the conditions of justice under which schools must work, such as the rights of parents/children to choose the form of pedagogy that appeals to them. They should not, for instance, prescribe the forms and contents of teaching and assessment.
- 13.
English edition: Steiner (1989b).
- 14.
The development of this sense has unfortunately remained a rather neglected aspect of Waldorf teacher education, which may have contributed to the relative isolation of Waldorf schools from mainstream educational developments.
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Dahlin, B. (2017). The Social and Political Aspects of Education. In: Rudolf Steiner. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58907-7_6
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