Fairies in the Cafeteria

“It’s really a miracle that you came out this normal,” he says.

It’s freshman year and I’m trying to tell my then-boyfriend about the Waldorf School, where I went from second to 12th grade. I’ve become convinced that all of my social idiosyncrasies will be accepted if I can only make my new friends see what it was like. Twenty students in my graduating class, okay? We munched molasses fruit snacks in our organic cafeteria and sang songs about fairies.

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.

I give a tour, just like I used to do in high school. Here our teacher stopped class so we could run outside and look at rare rainbow-colored clouds. On this hill, we enacted elaborate pageants for Michelmas, a feast day the rest of the world forgot in the middle ages. The whole school watched a vast papier-mâché dragon, animated by the entire sixth grade, vanquished by sword-wielding first graders.

In these rooms, hung with wreaths and watercolors, we learned to add and subtract with translucent jewels. When we got to multiplication, we were crowned knights of the three-times table by a tap on each shoulder with a wooden sword.

This is the art room. We made our own paper and scented it with cinnamon, transcribed vast amounts of scripture in calligraphy, made mosaics from medieval tapestries and shaped animals out of beeswax that you had to warm between your hands for 10 minutes before sculpting. “It taught us patience,” I say. “They taught us to work on something before trying to change it.” I feel the need to rationalize the seemingly arbitrary, touchy-feely nature of it.

That first year of 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.

“It’s an alternative school,” I say vaguely. “There are a bunch of them around the world.”

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 in 1947.

See these drawings? We learned to draw with bulky, square crayons, ones that made broad strips of color across the page. We weren’t allowed to draw with outlines, not ever, and every year, the teacher removed the black crayons from each box and replaced them with peach. Some of my black classmates later claimed the exchange was yet another manifestation of the Eurocentric, whitewashed nature of our supposedly alternative and multicultural education.

But what they told us later—these things were rarely explained at the time—was that as children, we had to learn first to configure a world without premature definitions. The narrow lines drawn by conventional stick crayons and the inexorability of black would restrict us. We were meant to understand form without limits.

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.

The situation wasn’t exactly conducive to healthy social development. It was all love-hate. The intensity of our friendships is something I can never hope to replicate; the entrenched rancor is something I hope I never will. So Harvard was a shock, but not for the reasons others had anticipated. For example, I had to learn what the norms for physical affection were for the rest of the world. My classmates grew up on one another’s bodies, in a constant contact stripped of sexual tension by years of familiarity. At Harvard, this same tactile dependency was construed as flirtatious invitation, which took me a whole semester of misled friends to understand.

This light, airy room with the soft wood floors: this is the Eurythmy room. Eurythmy is difficult to explain, even though I had a class in it twice a week for a decade. “Form, movement and language all ‘sound’ the essential nature of the world in different ways,” is how the Spring Valley Eurythmy school’s website explains it. “Eurythmy is a movement art that brings all three together. It gives expression to the whole voice of the human being and the world language, through movement, color and form. The spiritual nature behind each living thing begins to have a clear voice—a visible reality. The living mysteries that form our body, our soul, the stars and the seas speak their names in the gestures of language and life.”

I’m a 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 my early teens, I accused the teachers of maliciously sheltering us from the world. I’d raise my hand and declare nastily, “This isn’t the real world.” Post-graduation, some of my classmates are still bitter about the insularity and social repression, and still others think anthroposophy amounts to misty-eyed bullshit.

These are the things you see only later: that they were trying to create a cocoon of childhood for us, long after our peers were clicking through math enrichment CD-ROMs and beefing up their test-taking skills. That despite the practical problems of such undertakings, creating a viable alternative to the American education system is a courageous act.

A mother sidles up to me as I wait for my little brother to get out of class. It’s taking a while, because at the start and close of every day, the class teacher, their primary educator from first through eighth grade, stands at the door and shakes every single child’s hand.

“You go to Yale, right?” she says abruptly.

“Um…Harvard.”

“Good enough. My son is in eighth grade and he already knows he wants to go to Yale. Should I send him to Waldorf high school?”

The questions haven’t stopped, not since December of my senior year, when that acceptance letter fell through a slit in our front door. Long Island is flush with stellar public schools, and it isn’t easy to justify the more radical aspects of Waldorf education—for example, the aversion to competition, the policy on teaching reading relatively late in child development—in an increasingly accelerated society. Ironically, the fact that I go to Harvard—according to my high school principal, the first grad to do so since the mid-1970s—gave these parents irrefutable, all-purpose validation that something must be working.

Sometimes my mother, who receives most of these queries, asks me what she should tell them, these parents kept awake nights by the fear that they’re spending thousands of dollars a year for their child to be backward. Should she tell them I learned to read before I came to Waldorf? That in the hours that my friends learned the alphabet through the shapes of animals, I had a book hidden under my desk? That I regularly complain about the grievous gaps in my high school education?

I usually tell them that Waldorf helped bring me to Harvard, not by academic preparation—most classes were, quite frankly, laughable compared to the rigor experienced by many of my peers here—but by freeing me to explore my interests and giving me an innovative, holistic view on education. Still, I feel I should be honest with them. The social and intellectual opportunities are comparatively limited. If you’re not built for it, you may go crazy.

We can stop here in the lower school. Light is spilling into the halls, filtered by rainbow watercolor panels. This is the third grade; you can peek into the window. It’s early morning, so the children are standing up, clapping and singing in tinny, wavering voices. In the next hallway, the fourth graders are still saying the morning verse, the ambiguously religious poem that begins the school day. I said it every day for years. “I look into the world,” they intone. “In which the sun is shining / In which the stars are sparkling / Where stones in stillness lie…”

Like ours was, their recitation is almost involuntary, rendered meaningless through habit. I try to think now about what it means, but I can’t remember the words unless I say it out loud.

We were always relieved to reach the end, so we could finally sit down. It’s still my favorite part: “To thee Creator Spirit / I turn my heart to ask / that blessing and pure strength / for learning and for work / may ever grow within me.”

Irin Carmon ’05 is a literature concentrator in Quincy House. She still enjoys singing songs about fairies.