Steiner's claim that lasting social reform fails unless it begins by reforming how the child is taught and how teachers are formed.
Education as a social question is the Steiner principle that social renewal stands or falls on the school. In the August 1919 Dornach cycle he argued that demands for freedom, equality, and brotherhood in adult life can only ripen if the right forces of imitation, reverence for authority, and love are awakened in the three seven-year phases of childhood. Reform the teacher, and you reach the root of the social problem.
In Steiner's Own Words
The great problem of the future will be that of education. How will we have to deal with children so that they, as adults, can grow into the social, democratic, and spiritually free areas of living in the most comprehensive way? Spiritual science has pointed to this problem of education as present-day humanity will have to understand it if it wishes to advance. Social demands will remain chaotic if it is not seen that at their base lies the most urgent problem of the present time: the problem of education.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave these lectures in August 1919, and within weeks the principle took a concrete institutional form. Emil Molt, who owned the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, asked Steiner to set up a school for the workers' children, and the first Freie Waldorfschule opened in Stuttgart in September 1919. The naming is itself the argument: a school grew directly out of a factory owner's reading of the social question, not out of a ministry of education. Before the school opened, Steiner gave the founding teachers a three-week training course, because his whole claim in GA 296 was that the reform begins in the formation of the teacher, not in the syllabus. Today that lineage runs through more than a thousand Waldorf schools and through dedicated teacher seminars such as the Stuttgart Waldorf teacher-training and the pedagogical section at the Goetheanum in Dornach, where adult formation precedes classroom method.
Thalira synthesis: read this way, Steiner is not adding education to a list of social reforms but inverting the order of every reform, since the citizen who will one day vote, trade, and worship is first the child a teacher either frees or cripples. The social question, in his hands, becomes a teacher-training question that no economic policy can reach.
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