What do you value?

When Tin started going to Waldorf, I started reading about Rudolph Steiner and it just happened that all of this was happening around the same time the global crisis lit up. Steiner was avant-garde for his time, and sorry to say, even for our time. But he developed the Waldorf School out of a global crisis that was WW1, not unlike the global crisis we are facing today.

I’ve been watching the polarity of politics that has ripped through every country including sadly, our own. Obama – who is he? Seems like the conservatives want to darken his past to obscure the light of his presidency. But I give him credit for this one thing and this one alone – he represents my value system.

I was driving behind a car with an American flag on one side and a bumper sticker on the other that said – WANT TO END SOCIALISM – BUY A FORD. Obama is being accused of wanting to redistribute wealth and yes, that has gone awry before, just look no further than Cuba. But I don’t believe he has socialism or communism as we know it as his end goal; I do believe he wants to get things righted because they have gone so wrong.

A while ago, someone gave me an article by David Orr, “What is Education For?” where he asks about education and says:

In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? … “It emphasized theory instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstractions rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.”

He goes on to add:

… there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving you the means for upward mobility and success. Thomas Merton once identified this as the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” When asked to write about his own success, Merton responded by saying that “if it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident … I would take very good care never to do the same again.” His advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, be drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

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.

The article is filled with insights and history of education and also a vision. Orr writes:

… there is a myth that our culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement: we alone are modern, technological, and developed. … Communism failed because it produced so little at too high a cost. But capitalism has also failed because it produces too much, shares too little, also at too high a cost to our children and grandchildren. Communism failed as an ascetic morality. Capitalism failed because it destroys morality altogether. … We have built a world of sybaritic wealth for a few and Calcuttan poverty for a growing underclass.

Which brings me back to Steiner whose unique contributions to social science was to formulate a set of social laws or principles which connect human consciousness to social behavior and to their social and economic consequences (taken from Christopher Schaefer’s article “Toxic Excess: Wealth Disparities & the Fundamental Social Law”). Steiner states in his Fundamental Social Law that:

In a community of human beings working together, the well-being of the community is the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of the work he has himself done; i.e., the more of those proceeds he makes over to his fellow worker, and the more of his own requirements are satisfied, not out of his own work, but out of the work done by others … every institution in a community of human beings that is contrary to this law will inevitably engender in some part of it, after some time, suffering and want.

Schaefer goes on to say that “The toxic effects of these wealth disparities in the United States express themselves in poorer national health and higher health-care costs, in the highest per capital reported prison population in the world and one of the highest levels of guard labor, in an erosion of our democracy and in the undermining of our economic recovery.”

So I will vote my conscious, I will send my child to a Waldorf School, and I will find value in what brings us together, instead of what divides us.

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