But its idealism does close off other avenues of human development. My primary complaint about the Waldorf movement is that it offers itself as the universal ideal of education and lacks the self-criticism and openness to other perspectives that would permit flexibility and responsiveness to diverse human situations. Before I go further with this critique, I want to make it clear that I have been drawn to Rudolf Steiner's thinking ever since I first encountered it. Holistic education is not whole without a spiritual foundation. There could be no alternatives without educational freedom, and Waldorf educators have stated this case more coherently than anyone.
Libertarian ideology is a partial vision, too.
At a Waldorf school, our children will not be treated as future job seekers or savvy consumers or high tech warriors in the battle against foreign competition, but as evolving spiritual beings who seek lives of meaning and beauty and inspiration. Still, my background in other alternative education movements informs me that the Waldorf methodology is not the only or necessarily the best expression of educational and social renewal. Alternative educational visions all reject the dominant modern conception of schooling which seeks to harness human energies to the mechanical requirements of the economic system and the state. For example, Maria Montessori was, like Steiner, sensitively attuned to the different cognitive and emotional stages of children's growth, and like Steiner, she perceived that spiritual forces, not to be tampered with by modern ideologies, were at work in the unfolding of these stages. Yet her educational system reflected her cultural milieu and the circumstances of the children she worked with, and a Montessori classroom is consequently a very different environment.