Cult leader comes clean?

"Dokument inifrån: De utvalda barnen" (The chosen children) is a Swedish documentary in three parts, only available in Swedish at SVT Play. The documentary is made by Jasper Lake, a former student at Solvikskolan, a radical Waldorf school at Järna south of Stockholm. As a grown-up, Lake started a Facebook group for former Solvik students, and much to his astonishment realized that the school had a dark side he was completely unaware of. Former students told stories about bullying and malign neglect, often at the initiative of the teachers. Lake realized that he had been one of the "good" kids, selected and specially treated by the teachers. Those who didn´t fit in were treated very differently... 

Waldorf schooling is an "alternative" form of pedagogy developed by Austrian polymath Rudolf Steiner about 100 years ago. Steiner also created a religious or spiritual movement known as Anthroposophy. Waldorf education is based on the occult and frequently bizarre ideas of Steiner, who claimed the ability to "see" into the spirit-world by supernatural clairvoyance. In Sweden, Järna is the center of Anthroposophy. The relation between Solvikskolan and the wider Anthroposophical movement isn´t entirely clear. On the one hand, Solvik were expelled from the Swedish Waldorf Federation for being too extreme (really for following Steiner´s intstructions to the letter). On the other hand, Solvik were considered a role model by the Anthroposophists internationally, and the school´s founder Pär Ahlbom frequently lectured at meetings abroad, suggesting that *he* wasn´t expelled from much of anything (Ahlbom is in fact a devoted Anthroposophist). 

The atmosphere at the school seems to have been bizarre and cultish even at the best of times (or "best"). Dance, song, music classes and pageants took up most of the school days, but the creativity of individual teachers or children must have been severly hampered by Steiner´s dogmatic specifications: no piano allowed, the dance was "eurythmy" - a special kind of dance developed by Steiner and his wife Marie von Sivers - and the pageants probably had an Anthroposophical message. The students were talked into thinking that they were part of something huge and important. In reality, they didn´t learn anything useful. When Jasper Lake began to attend a non-Waldorf senior high school, he was expelled after just one semester, since he literally didn´t know anything! Other students told similar stories: no grades, no knowledge, some could hardly read, and so on. When the government´s school inspectors showed up, the kids pretended to have real classes with real school books, which were quickly stashed away when the inspectors left...

Gradually, a darker picture emerges. As already noted, the children frequently bullied each other, often with the teachers not doing anything, or even initiating the bullying. The kids were encouraged to play in a rope swing hanging in a tree outside the school building. The play frequently ended with children getting seriously hurt - several times, students had to be flown to the nearest hospital in a helicopter! One teacher "played" some kind of suffocation game with the children, or even stepped on them (the kids were only 8 years old), presumably to make them "wake up spiritually". Children with special needs were looked down upon (yet, Anthroposophists claim to take care of such people), and so was essentially everyone who didn´t "fit the format" one way or another. 

Steiner divided people into four categories depending on their temperament, and it seems that students who were seen as "sanguine" were promoted by the teachers, while the three other personality types were seen as more negative. One teacher let a kid attack and beat up another, with the argument that one of them needed an outlet for his agressions, while the other needed to learn to stand up for herself - apparently some kind of polarity work. Steiner´s weird belief system was never explicitly taught at the school, but it was certainly practiced. This includes its murkier sides, such as the belief in karma and reincarnation. That some kids were hurt or beaten up was seen as "karmic" and hence in some sense "good".

The spider in this web is Pär Ahlbom, who founded the school about 40 years ago. Lake interviewed him at some length. He also talked to his son Gudmund and daughter Elsa. At first, Ahlbom seems to be a nice old man (he is 88 years old) interested in spirituality, art and Kulturkritik. He comes across as a well-meaning utopian who simply doesn´t understand that his ideas and lofty ideals don´t work in the real world. Gradually, however, a more disturbing picture emerges. Pär seems to be in complete denial about what happened at the school during his time as de facto leader, says he "can´t remember" things, that a particularly crazy teacher was "spiritually interesting", etc. At one point, he even seems to be mocking the victims: "Oh, so you were hurt in your soul? How awful". His Anthroposophy is fanatical: Steiner, it seems, can never go wrong, it´s majority society that is sick and needs to change, not the Solvik school. 

Elsa reveals that when she fell badly from the swing (at the age of 10) and was knocked unconscious, Pär didn´t really care...until she told him about an out-of-body experience she had during her trauma. This made him feel exilerated, claiming that her severe accident was actually positive! Elsa then says that her father never feels any shame, guilt or empathy, and seems almost impervious to pain. Is Pär actually a psychopath or, at the very least, a person with undiagnosed Asperger´s? That´s the question I asked myself when seeing this part of "De utvalda barnen".

At the very last moment, the documentary takes a *very* unexpected turn. Pär´s wife dies after a protracted battle with cancer. For the first time in his life, the old man feels real grief. Somehow, this makes him realize that he really has been a bad person most of his life. He admits having been a "dictator" and "almost a cult leader", and tries to reconcile himself with his son during a dramatic eye-to-eye meeting at Solvik. I have no idea whether Pär is sincere (although I would love to think so), but his last minute apology just might be what is needed to save the reputation of Waldorf schools in Sweden. 

Swedish media haven´t yet commented the last episode (which haven´t been shown on regular TV yet, although it´s already available at SVT Play), but reactions to Waldorf schooling and Anthroposophy after the first two episodes were, as expected, uniformly negative. What did surprise me, frankly, was that the newspapers had no problems finding people who had attended Waldorf schools, or knew somebody who did...among their own contributors or sub-editors. Did every other crazy liberal in Sweden attend a Waldorf school? Did this affect their worldview somehow? Made them equally naive and fanatical? This is not the first time I´m baffled by the success among liberals or "the woke" of Waldorf pedagogy, despite the fact that Anthroposophy is a very "problematic" movement. I mean, Steiner supported Germany in World War I, believed in racial differences and hierarchies, and had an obsession with Goethe, who was politically conservative! He probably said something negative about Jews, too, although I haven´t bothered checking.

"Dokument inifrån: De utvalda barnen" is a tour de force and probably even worth some kind of award, but I feel that there might be more to unearth here...