The World School Association was Steiner's projected international body meant to awaken world opinion and gather funds so free schools could arise everywhere; it was never founded.
World School Association in Anthroposophy is the name of the projected international association, in German the Weltschulverein, that Rudolf Steiner urged between 1920 and 1923 as the instrument that would awaken world opinion for free education and gather the means so that schools in the spirit of educational renewal could arise everywhere. The idea belongs to the threefold social organism: schooling was to stand inside a free spiritual life, funded by the will of humanity rather than administered by the state, with the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart serving as the model. The record of the effort survives in GA 259, The Fateful Year 1923 in the History of the Anthroposophical Society, where Steiner states plainly that it was not possible to found the World School Association. Its unrealized function, gathering worldwide support for free schools, is carried today by bodies such as the Friends of Waldorf Education.
The World School Association is one of the unbuilt structures of the anthroposophical movement: an international society that would popularize the idea of the free school and maintain model schools through worldwide contributions. Steiner pressed for it repeatedly during the crisis year of 1923, and its failure to appear became for him a measure of the movement's missing will. The German name is Weltschulverein.
In Steiner's Own Words
The difficulty is this: initially, for the first step, the people who live somewhere have no direct interest in supporting a school in Stuttgart that they cannot send their children to, so they have to say to themselves: We support a school, but we cannot allow our children to benefit from it. The only way to overcome this is to make it a matter for the whole of humanity. To support something that I have often emphasized: to propagate the idea of a free school in the form of a world school association. Then people would broaden their primary judgment and say to themselves: We see that schools can become better through this method, and such a school must exist as a model school. Then people would not focus so much on the effectiveness of the details but on the big idea of the free school.
What it Means Today
The institution Steiner could not call into being has a recognizable successor. In 1971, supporters of the Waldorf movement founded the Friends of Waldorf Education (Freunde der Erziehungskunst Rudolf Steiners), a German nonprofit that does what the Weltschulverein was projected to do: it gathers contributions across borders and passes them to schools that could not otherwise exist. The Friends have channeled donations to Waldorf initiatives on every inhabited continent, they publish the Waldorf World List, which now counts more than 1,200 schools in some 80 countries, and they coordinate WOW-Day, an annual action in which Waldorf students raise funds for classmates they will never meet. Since 2006 the organization has also practiced emergency pedagogy, sending teams under Bernd Ruf into war and disaster zones, beginning in Lebanon, to stabilize traumatized children through Waldorf methods.
Thalira synthesis: the World School Association is the clearest case in the movement's history of an idea that failed as an institution yet succeeded as an impulse, which is why Steiner's bitterness in GA 259 reads today less as an obituary than as a deferred founding document. The world opinion he tried to awaken by proclamation eventually assembled itself around the schools, one parent body and one sponsorship at a time, and anyone who wants to test the idea can watch it operate in any Waldorf school's scholarship fund.
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