A proper name borrowed from a Stuttgart cigarette factory in 1919, now carried by a worldwide school movement and the spiritual pedagogy Rudolf Steiner founded.
Waldorf is the proper name borne, since 1919, by the school movement and pedagogical worldview Rudolf Steiner founded in Stuttgart. The word itself was not coined for a school. It was the trade name of a cigarette factory, the Waldorf-Astoria-Zigarettenfabrik, whose director Emil Molt asked Steiner to educate the workers' children. From that factory door the name passed to a school, to a movement, and now to more than 1,200 schools worldwide.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is incumbent upon us to feel the importance of our task. We will do so when we know that this school has been entrusted with a special task. We will only do this if we do not, so to speak, relegate what has been done with the founding of this school to the everyday, but if we regard it as a solemn act of the world order. In this sense, I would first like to express my heartfelt thanks to those good spirits who inspired our dear Mr. Molt with the good idea of doing what he has done with the Waldorf School in this direction and in this place for the further development of humanity.
What it Means Today
The word "Waldorf" travels along a strange route. Emil Molt, director of the Waldorf-Astoria-Zigarettenfabrik in Stuttgart, had bought the brand name from a tobacconist inside the New York hotel owned by the Astor family. The hotel, in turn, took its name from Waldorf in the German Rhineland, the village John Jacob Astor left in the eighteenth century. By the time the word reached a Stuttgart factory floor in 1906, it was already a piece of American hotel marketing recycled through European tobacco. In April 1919 Molt asked Steiner to educate the children of his roughly one thousand workers. The school opened on 7 September 1919 with 256 children. Because Molt's company paid for it and his workers' children filled the benches, the school was simply called die Waldorfschule. The pedagogy, then the international movement, kept the name.
For practitioners and parents the practical point is that "Waldorf" today is a name, not a trademark in the legal sense. The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America accredits member schools, and the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship does similar work in Europe, but no single body owns the word. A Waldorf classroom is recognised by what is done inside it, the three seven-year stages, the main-lesson block, eurythmy, form drawing, festival cycle, rather than by a licence on the door. When you read "Waldorf" on a kindergarten sign in Brantford, Berlin, or Bangalore, you are reading a thread that runs back, through a cigarette factory, to a single inspired conversation between an industrialist and a spiritual teacher in postwar Germany.
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