The following essay appeared in an abbreviated form in the May 5, 2026 edition of Waldorf Today. We are grateful to David Kennedy, editor of that journal, for his permission to complete essay.
Piaget’s Broken Bicycle
By Eugene Schwartz
Several years ago, I worked closely with David Elkind, whose book, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go had become a bestseller among parents and educators. He had invited me to join him present a series of lectures about the potential for Waldorf schools to overcome precocity in pedagogy. During our travels, David sometimes shared with me his own experiences as a student and colleague of the eminent Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
An especially poignant story concerned Piaget’s bicycle, which he pedaled from his home to his lecture hall for decades. By the time Elkind was working with Piaget, the beloved bike was falling apart, and over the course of a year the professor’s students took action. Every week or two they would quietly replace a rusting chain, a worn pedal, or a moth-eaten seat with a brand-new equivalent. Indeed, by commencement day Piaget arrived at the ceremonies riding on the “same” bicycle, although not a single old component remained. His students cheered, and Piaget applauded their initiative in his closing address.
That evening, however, speaking in confidence to Elkind, Piaget said, “They were so dear to rebuild that antique so skillfully that it looks very much the same. But when I sit on the seat, place my feet on the pedals, and try to steer, nothing about it feels the same. It is no longer my beloved bicycle, and I don’t think I will be able to ride it much longer!”
Elkind smiled and cast a mischievous look at me. “And what would Rudolf Steiner have to say about that?” he asked. I thought for a moment and replied, “Inanimate as it was, over the decades that bicycle may have been imbued with something of Jean Piaget’s etheric body. Each new part might add more mechanical efficiency, but it also subtracted some of those etheric forces. And it may be that by the time all the old parts were removed that intimate connection was lost altogether. The physical bike may have been rebuilt, but Piaget was gone.”
I often recalled that conversation with Dr Elkind during the years I spent creating the Waldorf Online courses (iwaldorf.net), and it still comes to mind as I prepare our new summer cycle. Since Waldorf’s one-hundredth anniversary there have been many cries to renew Steiner’s original lesson plan. A growing number of its antique parts, judged irreparable, are being modified or replaced with more contemporary components. It still looks like the 1919 classic, but what is it like to take the driver’s seat?
Throughout this fiery period of change in our educational movement the Waldorf Online courses have retained their connection with Rudolf Steiner’s curriculum, choosing to deepen his indications rather than dispense with them. Our summer course presentations are committed to that curriculum. Here are some reflections about our approach – and why they support a summer program that many feel is their most dependable guide to the school year ahead.
Replacement and rebuilding hold true in the mechanical world, but the machine may not be the best prototype for us to use in understanding and advancing education. A look at the musical arts may bring us closer to the art of education. A musical score is composed and then performed. If the score is meaningful to its audience, it is likely to be performed again, perhaps in turn reaching ever-wider audiences, even attaining the status of a “classic.”
Despite social, political, and cultural changes, the musical piece continues to touch, engage, and even inspire generations of performers and audiences over the course of centuries. However, the score remains the same, an assemble of musical notes that have been written on paper. What brings it to life are the musicians who strive to bring those unchanging, “dead” notes to life in their time, for their audiences, and validate its universality. If we use a musical analogy to judge the Waldorf curriculum, we may recognize that, like musical notation, it will retain or even increase its ability to reawaken and revitalize – if the devotion and connection of its performers is there. Education should be viewed less as a delivery system and more as a work of art.
The shock and paralysis of the Covid epidemic – amid the celebrations of Waldorf’s one hundredth anniversary – renewed the calls for a reformation of Steiner’s curriculum to meet today’s child. Waldorf’s founder, it was argued, was unprepared in 1919 to meet the crises and attendant childhood traumas of our new century.
It might be helpful to recollect that in 1919 the first students to enter the new school had, for more than half their lives, experienced a war in which family members may have been killed, a devastating flu epidemic (much worse than Covid), an Allied embargo of Germany that purposely denied them an adequate diet, and the ongoing threat of civil war within their own homeland . . . . In short, RS was ordered to create a curriculum that was born to meet the needs of a generation of children and teachers whose everyday lives were filled with devastation. He recognized that the fragmentary and unpredictable nature of the modern school would require not only the continuity of a lead teacher who would remain with her class for eight years, to provide the child with stability and comfort, sometimes in loco parentis. This new school would also require a curriculum that would give the grade schooler an experience of the complexity and richness and meaningfulness of the human experience through the centuries.
His task was to design lesson plans for every subject that would elicit strength and joy in the students’ lives. The uniqueness of those lessons is that they are also intended to provide teachers during their preparation and classroom time with the strength to meet and contend with life’s challenges. The harder the teacher has to work to overcome an antipathy to a subject, the more she must struggle to forge a connection or even a love for that subject, the more powerful and beneficial her lessons will be for the students and teacher alike.
The artistry and cultural depth of Steiner’s educational foundations have, ironically, led to his representation as being clueless in the twenty-first century, unable to meet what today’s much more confused children might need in their classrooms. This critique reached its peak during the Covid epidemic, as schools were closed, and students, teachers, and parents could only meet electronically. The ahrimanic nature of the online medium not surprisingly led to more conflict than collaboration, and the door was opened wide for the impulses of teachers and parents to bring in “experts” in racism, colonialism, sexual identity and other movements. Those experts’ reliance on acronyms for self-identification has led me to lump together the components of the movement as Acronymia, an neologism that suggests the acrimony that was directed again the Waldorf curriculum. Cutting and pasting with the freedom suddenly granted by the impersonal expanses of online schools, the Acronymians “fixed” the curriculum at a pace more akin to a body shop than an educational forum.
There are few indications, however, that renting the fabric of the old curriculum has resulted in much pedagogical improvement, enrollment growth, or demographic change in school populations. Shifting once again from auto mechanics to music, we might recall Mozart’s retort to Emperor Joseph II when the ruler complained that the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio had “too many notes” and Mozart famously replied, “There are just as many notes as there should be.” Music historians and audiences are grateful for the composer’s response; future educators may long bemoan that Steiner could not be physically present to prevent Waldorf’s pedagogical debacle.
When the First Goetheanum burned to ground, Rudolf Steiner immediately set about launching plans for the building’s replacement. Many of Steiner’s students longed for another wooden building, but Steiner demurred and declared that the new structure would be constructed of reinforced concrete. He spoke to several dismayed audiences about this decision, and at least once explained: “The First Goetheanum arose because of the donations of labor and money offered with love by people worldwide. That kind of contribution will be less likely in our post-war time. Most of the funds we need will come from our insurance companies, and they will argue with us about every claim we bring forward. Wood reflected the life and love that was poured into the first building. Concrete, a dead material, will reflect the hatred of those who will make the second structure possible. “
I would contend that many of the changes being forced upon the Waldorf curriculum in the name of Social Justice are no less antagonistic to Waldorf education than were the strictures of those insurance companies. The demands that Steiner makes on the teacher’s time and effort, the unfamiliarity of approaches to subjects that are rooted in the child’s (and teacher’s) changing consciousness, and the Western foundations of so much that is taught have made the curriculum and its creator many enemies over recent decades. Unlike Social Justice issues that speak to the intellect and may be quickly “mastered” by the academic world and the movements it spawns and supports, Steiner’s slower, soul-oriented methodologies take time, devotion, and inner energy to penetrate. It would be tragic if the “new curriculum” were merely set in stone. It is often argued that unless the curriculum is brought into the flow of contemporary life with its manifold political and racial issues, Waldorf education with fade into irrelevance. As I noted earlier, the second and third decades of the twentieth century had their share of social issues, most of them riddled with fear. Yet Rudolf Steiner created a curriculum and a modus operandi for children and teachers that barely touched upon the social issues that stood right outside the school’s doorway. What was he telling parents and teachers that century ago?
It is often argued that unless the curriculum is brought into the flow of contemporary life with its manifold political and racial issues, Waldorf education with fade into irrelevance. As I noted earlier, the second and third decades of the twentieth century had their share of social issues, most of them riddled with fear. Yet Rudolf Steiner created a curriculum and a modus operandi for children and teachers that barely touched upon the social issues that stood right outside the school’s doorway. What was he telling parents and teachers that century ago?
We need only recall the tremendous expenditure of energy with which the Waldorf leadership urged its member schools to form committees, attend conferences, and re-examine the Waldorf curriculum to scrub it clean of prejudices and exclusivity. Throughout the early 2020s the general understanding was that the Waldorf movement – and the Anthroposophical Society that nurtured it – were, however subtly, engaged in destructive behavior that had to be ended.
As the decade moved on, a new American President shocked his opponents with the vitriol of his opposition to social justice and the ferocity of his actions. No sector of American society, public or private, remained unthreatened, and even the most powerful and wealthy educational institutions were cowed into some degree of submission. Having proudly united themselves with the “outer world,” Waldorf schools suddenly found themselves with shrinking support from parents.
This is, of course, a specific example from a hopefully anomalous period of American life. However, it illustrates the foresight with which Rudolf Steiner created a sustainable curriculum long before that adjective became a buzzword. He sought for content that had a quality of longevity and resilience rather than trendiness. It is content that is unlikely to appear in today’s fear-filled headlines, but it is content that reflects or even exemplifies the wisdom and possibility that weaves through humanity.
Despite its remarkable qualities, like a Mozart opera, the curriculum remains inert until it is brought to life by a teacher. The Waldorf school is not the setting of a delivery service, where content memorized (or read) by the teacher is merely conveyed to the whole class. Steiner hoped that the curricular content would have been not only memorized but taken to heart by the teacher. This content can touch every student in a slightly different way, and as the teacher observes the class’s moment-by moment, child-by -child responses, be they sympathetic or antipathetic, comprehending or lost, the instructor alters it slightly, bringing it to life moment by moment.
This is teaching as a performing art, in which every subject, from the mythological to the scientific, is rendered at once universal and specific to each child. Such simultaneity is not automatic but is the fruit of the daily effort made by the teacher to re-experience the subject from within the children. Developing such a capacity takes focus – and time -- and is one of the most important aspects of the eight-year relationship of teacher and class. (This relationship, urged by Steiner, is yet another component of the Waldorf experience that is fading away.) The study of the Waldorf curriculum in the light of today’s conflicts and uncertainties will reveal the depths of Steiner’s mission. In the herculean task of revitalizing education, he is a leader, but no less our guide, and preeminently a friend.
If you are looking to go more deeply into Steiner’s Waldorf curriculum, the Waldorf Online courses are unique in providing two weeks filled with hours of insight and content that will help you make Steiner’s words come to life. Please visit us.
By Eugene Schwartz
Several years ago, I worked closely with David Elkind, whose book, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go had become a bestseller among parents and educators. He had invited me to join him present a series of lectures about the potential for Waldorf schools to overcome precocity in pedagogy. During our travels, David sometimes shared with me his own experiences as a student and colleague of the eminent Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
An especially poignant story concerned Piaget’s bicycle, which he pedaled from his home to his lecture hall for decades. By the time Elkind was working with Piaget, the beloved bike was falling apart, and over the course of a year the professor’s students took action. Every week or two they would quietly replace a rusting chain, a worn pedal, or a moth-eaten seat with a brand-new equivalent. Indeed, by commencement day Piaget arrived at the ceremonies riding on the “same” bicycle, although not a single old component remained. His students cheered, and Piaget applauded their initiative in his closing address.
That evening, however, speaking in confidence to Elkind, Piaget said, “They were so dear to rebuild that antique so skillfully that it looks very much the same. But when I sit on the seat, place my feet on the pedals, and try to steer, nothing about it feels the same. It is no longer my beloved bicycle, and I don’t think I will be able to ride it much longer!”
Elkind smiled and cast a mischievous look at me. “And what would Rudolf Steiner have to say about that?” he asked. I thought for a moment and replied, “Inanimate as it was, over the decades that bicycle may have been imbued with something of Jean Piaget’s etheric body. Each new part might add more mechanical efficiency, but it also subtracted some of those etheric forces. And it may be that by the time all the old parts were removed that intimate connection was lost altogether. The physical bike may have been rebuilt, but Piaget was gone.”
I often recalled that conversation with Dr Elkind during the years I spent creating the Waldorf Online courses (iwaldorf.net), and it still comes to mind as I prepare our new summer cycle. Since Waldorf’s one-hundredth anniversary there have been many cries to renew Steiner’s original lesson plan. A growing number of its antique parts, judged irreparable, are being modified or replaced with more contemporary components. It still looks like the 1919 classic, but what is it like to take the driver’s seat?
Throughout this fiery period of change in our educational movement the Waldorf Online courses have retained their connection with Rudolf Steiner’s curriculum, choosing to deepen his indications rather than dispense with them. Our summer course presentations are committed to that curriculum. Here are some reflections about our approach – and why they support a summer program that many feel is their most dependable guide to the school year ahead.
Replacement and rebuilding hold true in the mechanical world, but the machine may not be the best prototype for us to use in understanding and advancing education. A look at the musical arts may bring us closer to the art of education. A musical score is composed and then performed. If the score is meaningful to its audience, it is likely to be performed again, perhaps in turn reaching ever-wider audiences, even attaining the status of a “classic.”
Despite social, political, and cultural changes, the musical piece continues to touch, engage, and even inspire generations of performers and audiences over the course of centuries. However, the score remains the same, an assemble of musical notes that have been written on paper. What brings it to life are the musicians who strive to bring those unchanging, “dead” notes to life in their time, for their audiences, and validate its universality. If we use a musical analogy to judge the Waldorf curriculum, we may recognize that, like musical notation, it will retain or even increase its ability to reawaken and revitalize – if the devotion and connection of its performers is there. Education should be viewed less as a delivery system and more as a work of art.
The shock and paralysis of the Covid epidemic – amid the celebrations of Waldorf’s one hundredth anniversary – renewed the calls for a reformation of Steiner’s curriculum to meet today’s child. Waldorf’s founder, it was argued, was unprepared in 1919 to meet the crises and attendant childhood traumas of our new century.
It might be helpful to recollect that in 1919 the first students to enter the new school had, for more than half their lives, experienced a war in which family members may have been killed, a devastating flu epidemic (much worse than Covid), an Allied embargo of Germany that purposely denied them an adequate diet, and the ongoing threat of civil war within their own homeland . . . . In short, RS was ordered to create a curriculum that was born to meet the needs of a generation of children and teachers whose everyday lives were filled with devastation. He recognized that the fragmentary and unpredictable nature of the modern school would require not only the continuity of a lead teacher who would remain with her class for eight years, to provide the child with stability and comfort, sometimes in loco parentis. This new school would also require a curriculum that would give the grade schooler an experience of the complexity and richness and meaningfulness of the human experience through the centuries.
His task was to design lesson plans for every subject that would elicit strength and joy in the students’ lives. The uniqueness of those lessons is that they are also intended to provide teachers during their preparation and classroom time with the strength to meet and contend with life’s challenges. The harder the teacher has to work to overcome an antipathy to a subject, the more she must struggle to forge a connection or even a love for that subject, the more powerful and beneficial her lessons will be for the students and teacher alike.
The artistry and cultural depth of Steiner’s educational foundations have, ironically, led to his representation as being clueless in the twenty-first century, unable to meet what today’s much more confused children might need in their classrooms. This critique reached its peak during the Covid epidemic, as schools were closed, and students, teachers, and parents could only meet electronically. The ahrimanic nature of the online medium not surprisingly led to more conflict than collaboration, and the door was opened wide for the impulses of teachers and parents to bring in “experts” in racism, colonialism, sexual identity and other movements. Those experts’ reliance on acronyms for self-identification has led me to lump together the components of the movement as Acronymia, an neologism that suggests the acrimony that was directed again the Waldorf curriculum. Cutting and pasting with the freedom suddenly granted by the impersonal expanses of online schools, the Acronymians “fixed” the curriculum at a pace more akin to a body shop than an educational forum.
There are few indications, however, that renting the fabric of the old curriculum has resulted in much pedagogical improvement, enrollment growth, or demographic change in school populations. Shifting once again from auto mechanics to music, we might recall Mozart’s retort to Emperor Joseph II when the ruler complained that the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio had “too many notes” and Mozart famously replied, “There are just as many notes as there should be.” Music historians and audiences are grateful for the composer’s response; future educators may long bemoan that Steiner could not be physically present to prevent Waldorf’s pedagogical debacle.
When the First Goetheanum burned to ground, Rudolf Steiner immediately set about launching plans for the building’s replacement. Many of Steiner’s students longed for another wooden building, but Steiner demurred and declared that the new structure would be constructed of reinforced concrete. He spoke to several dismayed audiences about this decision, and at least once explained: “The First Goetheanum arose because of the donations of labor and money offered with love by people worldwide. That kind of contribution will be less likely in our post-war time. Most of the funds we need will come from our insurance companies, and they will argue with us about every claim we bring forward. Wood reflected the life and love that was poured into the first building. Concrete, a dead material, will reflect the hatred of those who will make the second structure possible. “
I would contend that many of the changes being forced upon the Waldorf curriculum in the name of Social Justice are no less antagonistic to Waldorf education than were the strictures of those insurance companies. The demands that Steiner makes on the teacher’s time and effort, the unfamiliarity of approaches to subjects that are rooted in the child’s (and teacher’s) changing consciousness, and the Western foundations of so much that is taught have made the curriculum and its creator many enemies over recent decades. Unlike Social Justice issues that speak to the intellect and may be quickly “mastered” by the academic world and the movements it spawns and supports, Steiner’s slower, soul-oriented methodologies take time, devotion, and inner energy to penetrate. It would be tragic if the “new curriculum” were merely set in stone. It is often argued that unless the curriculum is brought into the flow of contemporary life with its manifold political and racial issues, Waldorf education with fade into irrelevance. As I noted earlier, the second and third decades of the twentieth century had their share of social issues, most of them riddled with fear. Yet Rudolf Steiner created a curriculum and a modus operandi for children and teachers that barely touched upon the social issues that stood right outside the school’s doorway. What was he telling parents and teachers that century ago?
It is often argued that unless the curriculum is brought into the flow of contemporary life with its manifold political and racial issues, Waldorf education with fade into irrelevance. As I noted earlier, the second and third decades of the twentieth century had their share of social issues, most of them riddled with fear. Yet Rudolf Steiner created a curriculum and a modus operandi for children and teachers that barely touched upon the social issues that stood right outside the school’s doorway. What was he telling parents and teachers that century ago?
We need only recall the tremendous expenditure of energy with which the Waldorf leadership urged its member schools to form committees, attend conferences, and re-examine the Waldorf curriculum to scrub it clean of prejudices and exclusivity. Throughout the early 2020s the general understanding was that the Waldorf movement – and the Anthroposophical Society that nurtured it – were, however subtly, engaged in destructive behavior that had to be ended.
As the decade moved on, a new American President shocked his opponents with the vitriol of his opposition to social justice and the ferocity of his actions. No sector of American society, public or private, remained unthreatened, and even the most powerful and wealthy educational institutions were cowed into some degree of submission. Having proudly united themselves with the “outer world,” Waldorf schools suddenly found themselves with shrinking support from parents.
This is, of course, a specific example from a hopefully anomalous period of American life. However, it illustrates the foresight with which Rudolf Steiner created a sustainable curriculum long before that adjective became a buzzword. He sought for content that had a quality of longevity and resilience rather than trendiness. It is content that is unlikely to appear in today’s fear-filled headlines, but it is content that reflects or even exemplifies the wisdom and possibility that weaves through humanity.
Despite its remarkable qualities, like a Mozart opera, the curriculum remains inert until it is brought to life by a teacher. The Waldorf school is not the setting of a delivery service, where content memorized (or read) by the teacher is merely conveyed to the whole class. Steiner hoped that the curricular content would have been not only memorized but taken to heart by the teacher. This content can touch every student in a slightly different way, and as the teacher observes the class’s moment-by moment, child-by -child responses, be they sympathetic or antipathetic, comprehending or lost, the instructor alters it slightly, bringing it to life moment by moment.
This is teaching as a performing art, in which every subject, from the mythological to the scientific, is rendered at once universal and specific to each child. Such simultaneity is not automatic but is the fruit of the daily effort made by the teacher to re-experience the subject from within the children. Developing such a capacity takes focus – and time -- and is one of the most important aspects of the eight-year relationship of teacher and class. (This relationship, urged by Steiner, is yet another component of the Waldorf experience that is fading away.) The study of the Waldorf curriculum in the light of today’s conflicts and uncertainties will reveal the depths of Steiner’s mission. In the herculean task of revitalizing education, he is a leader, but no less our guide, and preeminently a friend.
If you are looking to go more deeply into Steiner’s Waldorf curriculum, the Waldorf Online courses are unique in providing two weeks filled with hours of insight and content that will help you make Steiner’s words come to life. Please visit us.