Our History & impulse

In the spring of 1979 a small group of people, inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner, met to consider the possibility of establishing a centre for Steiner education in Newcastle. From this group emerged a few who were willing to take on the tasks of teaching, administering and working towards that goal. Their impulse was Steiner’s call to modern individuals to educate their young by nourishing the senses, imagination and feelings in order that they may grow into adulthood to think freely and competently for themselves. Their vision for the future was that these young people may then in turn have a desire to work with other likeminded people for the good of society.

To arrive at freedom of thought is the result of a long journey of understanding, during which children need to be taught a reverence for Nature and the honourable people of the present and the past. By strengthening the will and imagination in kindergarten and  primary school, a sound foundation for making judgments in the high school years can be laid, so they may eventually be given the possibility of conscious thinking which is free from prejudice, unconscious drives, and the pressures of peer group and the media.

To understand why Steiner saw the pressing need for likeminded individuals to work consciously together for the good of society, as opposed to working selfishly for their own survival, we needed to consider the unfolding of the epochs of mankind, and have a vision of a possible path into the future…

In tribal times survival depended upon working to preserve a community of blood-ties, and those who succeeded in this grew in strength and numbers. But when the fruits of this era had been achieved the established ties of kinship and serfdom became problematic.

The Middle Ages saw the rise of individualism, and those who no longer wished to be serfs moved into the free cities. For their survival and well-being individuals formed themselves into groups of mutual aid: guilds and lodges. These were highly regarded alliances that educated, protected and guided their members. They made decisions together on important matters such as the building of cathedrals, and the judging of their peers in legal matters – not through the entanglement in the abstraction of abstruse laws and legislation of today, but through a care and a need to understand where their fellows had gone astray and how to reinstate them in society.

In contrast to former times, when the tribes worked together out of instinct for physical preservation, the guildsmen worked together for the benefit not only of the physical, but also for the cultural, in the widest sense. But again, when the fruits of this Age had ripened they fell into corruption, and the great guilds, brotherhoods and fellowships degenerated into business corporations, where the corpus or body became a hierarchy of self-seekers. Factions, unions and parties arose to cover the material aspects of the guilds, omitting the spiritual and the emotional. Sadly, communism is only another face of the discharge of conscious brotherhood that should have arisen at the end of the nineteenth century.

Economic rationalism and political correctness have almost swiped out the possibility of conscious brotherhood – companies (those who share bread) of individuals who can fulfil their own destinies while working together for the common good, above race, sex, religion, education, trade or profession.  What is called for is an exciting leap into the future where individuals, prepared by a holistic education, have the possibility to join together to work for the benefit of society. This is the seeding of the fruits of tribal and guild brotherhood. We are in an age where this may yet be brought into reality – a spellbinding creative, conscious ideal open to all like-minded men and women.

This then is the historical essence of what lay behind the effort to establish this Waldorf School – not only that the children should be educated to fulfil their potential in the spheres of will, imagination and intelligence in a wholesome and nurturing environment, but that morally this would have the virtue of helping mankind enhance the next era of evolution.

The school itself began its physical existence in the summer of 1980, with nine kindergarten and nine primary children, in rented premises at Adamstown. By the spring of 1981 it became apparent that a permanent site was needed. The only available site close to town which had the potential to house not only the necessary buildings but also a range of  livestock that would enhance the children’s’ education, was a rundown, disused turkey farm – a collection of corrugated iron buildings on a bare block without hardly a tree or blade of grass. Many years of willing hard work and devotion by teachers and parents has gone into transforming the site into the pleasant and uplifting surroundings in which the school is now situated. Since the move to Glendale in 1982 this work has proceeded, with new buildings being added as time went on, and the teachers finding ways to work as rigorously as possible towards the indications of Rudolf Steiner for the welfare of the body, psyche and spirit of each individual child.