Word: waldorf
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Twice that year, I bring Harvard people back to Waldorf with me—said boyfriend and a friend with whom I feel especially close—and walk the halls determinedly, sure that those walls, sponge-painted in eggshell blue, can explain something. I show up in childish defiance of the dress code: bare midriff and shoulders, blue jeans. I talk too fast and accept the embraces and kisses of the teachers who watched me grow up. Am I happy at Harvard? I’m blissful...
...college, I constantly quiz people on where they went to high school, what it was like and what they thought of it. I hoard anecdotes about single-sex boarding schools, Manhattan prep schools, magnet schools, even the occasional unsung public school. No one’s even heard of Waldorf Schools...
Seven hundred, to be exact. In 1919, Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner founded the first one in Stuttgart, Germany as a free school for the children of laborers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Anthroposophy, the blanket term for his views on education, science, philosophy, religion, agriculture, drama and architecture, soon drew international interest. The first of about 160 Waldorf Schools in the United States was founded in Manhattan, in 1928, and the Long Island school, which I attended, followed...
Throughout the 11 years I was at Waldorf, the gender balance of our class seldom wavered: 14 girls, six boys. Many were what we affectionately called “lifers,” having begun their Waldorf career at the age of four...
...literature concentrator now, daily obliged to read mass quantities of theory about exactly such things, and now it seems less insane. But once our class hit adolescent skepticism, we were convinced our parents had mistakenly joined a cult. In those days, bitching about Waldorf was a standard activity, whether our parents were New Age healers or average types who just didn’t like the public school in their district. When we were kids it was because we weren’t allowed to watch TV and weren’t supposed to use computers until high school. Throughout...