“Whether I can help, I know not; an individual helps not, but one who combines with many at the proper hour. We will postpone the evil and keep hoping. Hold thy circle fast.”

Goethe, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

In an effort to try to shape society in a way that they hope will be healing, Seth Jordan and a group of friends recently founded an inspiring new organization called Think OutWord. Loosely based around Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on the threefold social order, Think OutWord is a peer-led training in social threefolding.

Until he went to college, Seth believed that education was a search for Truth. He’d graduated from the Green Meadow Waldorf School with high ideals, and was hoping to create a life that in some way implemented at least some of these. In college he took some courses on Marxism and the history of political thought, but most of what he read concerning the structure of society seemed threadbare.

“I’ve never been to a rally or protested anything,” he explains. “So in that way I’m not an activist. I was a philosophy major and I stayed with the humanities. I didn’t see a way of getting engaged in business or government. I had no idea what healthy social forms looked like and whether they were even possible. After going through Waldorf education I had strong pictures of Michael and the dragon and all those stories of the hero’s journey, but they were never really directed at society and transforming the world in concrete ways. In college I was looking for Truth with a capital but quickly found the educational system dead and oppressive. Afterwards, like many of my peers, I decided to go into manual labor. I wanted to do ‘honest work,’ meet real needs, and knew I wanted to stay from what I saw as “dishonest work”: business and government. I feel like this is the plight of a number of my anthroposophically-inspired peers, we don’t think about engaging the world at the societal level because we don’t have many examples of people working in this realm in meaningful and really healthy ways.”

Seth might have spent the rest of his life in manual labor, but his continued interest in social change led him to attend a workshop at the Rudolf Steiner Institute led by Nicanor Perlas. Nicanor introduced him to some of Rudolf Steiner’s social thinking, and this revealed to him entirely new possibilities of both making a living and living a purposeful life.

“I think of Nicanor Perlas as ‘the little Buddha of anthroposophy,’” says Seth. “I read his book, and he opened my mind to Civil Society, and the developments of the last twenty years. Activism is not really what it’s about. It’s more about working with social forms that strive to integrate economic, political, and cultural elements in a healthy way.”

The premise of the growing civil society is that it is a third cultural sector of society, distinct from government and business. It refers essentially to professional associations, religious groups, labor unions, citizen advocacy organizations, education, and the arts. The Institute for Social Renewal is another organization that has inspired Seth and his friends and made them wonder whether they could create a place to train people in social entrepreneurships.

“Are we doing what we came here to do?” Seth asks. Even for him, it’s a difficult question to answer. He explains: “Working with the thought that ‘what we need is here,’ and that what we are meant to do in the world can be understood as what is in need of doing, then we can begin to get an answer. And right now that answer is no: we’re not really doing what we came here to do.”

Simply put, for Seth that means working to change society so that it is premised on the ideal of human goodness.

“My understanding is that young people bring with them the spiritual impulses that are needed on the earth today, and everyone needs to live their destiny, to draw that out of them. I imagine that means working for good. There’s a lot of powerful and innovative ideas out there, but not enough people know about them.”

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Interview with Winslow Eliot

Posted on Why Waldorf Works

Last May, Kate Christensen won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for her novel The Great Man. Kate graduated from Green Meadow Waldorf School in 1980, determined to be a novelist. She proceeded to write and publish four humorous, caustic, utterly compelling novels: In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament, and The Great Man. All are well worth reading! Although she attended a Waldorf school for just her junior and senior years, her teachers and classes left a lasting impression on her.

WE: You moved to another state and a completely new kind of school for the last two years of high school. Since this was your first taste of Waldorf, how different was it and what surprised you, delighted you, confused you?

KC: I was born in Berkeley, California - my parents were both quite politically active there in the 1960s. My mother is a clinical psychologist (recently retired) who got her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, which is why we lived there. I went to public schools through 10th grade. When I was in 9th and 10th grade, I lived with my mother and two younger sisters in Jerome, a ghost town in the mountains of Northern Arizona. The high school I attended down in the Verde Valley was, I started to feel with increasing urgency, not challenging enough for me academically. During the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I decided to transfer to Green Meadow, which I knew about from visiting my grandmother, Ruth Pusch [editor and translator of many of Rudolf Steiner’s work, as well as others]. I applied, and got in with a heap of financial aid, which enabled me to pay the tuition. I lived with the Eaton family - Ann Eaton was teaching English at the High School - and did housework and babysitting in exchange for room and board. After being in a huge public high school with hundreds of kids in my class alone, I now found myself in a class of 13-15 kids - in a school of less than 60 altogether. I was very lonely at first; a lot of these kids had known each other since kindergarten, and they shared long-term history together, and I was the new kid, the outsider. But gradually I started to feel a bit more of a part of things, although late adolescence was never easy for me; it was a very lonely, awkward, painful time.

But in terms of the school, I was enthralled with the academic course work and the artistic and musical challenges I found at Green Meadow. We sang Mozart’s Requiem, wrote and illustrated our own main lesson books, read Wordsworth and Thoreau, had a lacrosse team, played Brandenberg concerti! Although at home my sisters and I had always sung three-part harmony, studied classical music on our instruments, and read literary novels and poetry, at school I was used to show tunes, standardized textbooks, volleyball, and cheerleaders… it was a thrill to be not only encouraged but challenged in my most passionate interests at school – I could hardly believe my luck. I never took it for granted for a second – I felt a profound and constant sense of gratitude during my time at Green Meadow, the relief of being among my own kind, whatever that was, for the first time in my life at school.

WE: What was your dream when you left – were you determined to “be a writer” right from the beginning?

KC: I have known I was a writer from the very beginning of my life – I wrote my first story at 6 – “My Magic Carpet Ride” – about a girl and her sister who go around the world on a magic carpet and get home in time for tea – and I have never wanted to be anything else.

WE: What year did you graduate, exactly?

KC: I graduated from Green Meadow in 1980 – which makes me 45 years old now – amazing.

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