A prescient thinker and famously eloquent speaker, he identified well ahead of his time many of the disruptive upheavals and promising reforms that would distinguish the latter decades of the twentieth century.

At first hand, initially as a student and eventually as an alumnus of the Garden City school, I experienced John Gardner’s ability to point to gathering storms years before they burst upon the public scene, and I learned to appreciate his courage and willingness to champion fresh approaches to seemingly intractable societal problems. For him, the secret to their resolution lay ultimately in the rightful education of children and young adults.  Hence, his lifelong devotion to Waldorf education.

Long before they were taken up in the mainstream of education, for instance,  John campaigned for radically new ideas concerning stewardship of the environment. Early on, he warned of governmental intrusion into matters of school curricula, proposing instead the need for a “new declaration of independence” from state control for both public and independent schools. He countered pressures to introduce technological devices to the classroom at ever younger ages by promoting the practice of imagination through the arts in all subjects. And decades before it became the tragic norm of daily news feeds, he foresaw the proliferation of gun violence in schools and other institutional places of congregation. Perhaps above all, he advocated for enlivened spiritual creativity and altruistic service to community in schools during an age of deadened intellectualism and suffocating consumerism.

As Faculty Chair, John Gardner expanded a fledgling Waldorf school of three elementary grades into a full K-12 institution, adding in the final years of his tenure there a graduate-level institute for Waldorf adult education and teacher training. He imbued the curriculum of both the school and the institute with a more robustly American character, favoring American authors such as the transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, in particular––over European Romantic writers, most notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose works at the time were the common currency among American Waldorf schools.

Philosophical and other roots

Like Emerson and other transcendentalists, John Gardner revered the natural world, but he also devoted himself to cultivating it.  “Human beings”, he wrote, “can bless—and are blessedwhen they set their hands to shape and tend the earth.”

The son of a one-time organic farmer, John—known as “Jack” in his youth—grew up as a skilled logger who could artfully untangle logjams as they rolled downstream. “He was able to do this because he had natural balance and poise,” one of his graduate students recalled. “In later life, he untangled intellectual logjams with comparable grace and balance.”

In retirement and well into his 80s, John continued to fell trees with a hand axe. His daughter Elizabeth Lombardi, in a memorial tribute to her father, described how he also carefully maintained up to eight piles of organic compost at various stages of maturing behind his home in rural Massachusetts.  In so many ways, “Jack” was truly a “Gardner”.

By his own admission, John was a recidivist college drop-out, having been accepted first of all to Princeton University in 1928 at the age of 15. (Having dropped out of Princeton, he also undertook—and interrupted—studies at Rollins College, the University of Chicago, and Teachers College at Columbia University.) During one of his several extended breaks from college life, he traveled to Switzerland in 1933, ostensibly to meet up with his girlfriend and future wife Carol Hemingway (the youngest sister of Ernest Hemingway). In the end, however, at the prompting of their mutual friend Christy MacKaye (later Barnes),  he spent three months with both of them in the pre-alpine village of Dornach, where he was introduced at the Goetheanum, the worldwide center of anthroposophy, to the work of Rudolf Steiner.

During this time, Gardner paid a fleeting visit to Zürich, where he managed to wrangle an impromptu after-hours interview with Carl Gustav Jung at his private lakeside home in Küsnacht. Although Jung offered to train him as a psychoanalyst, John decided instead to resume what would become a lifelong study of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy.

For John Gardner, as for Rudolf Steiner, the spiritual world preceded and gave rise to the material world. On this view, the latter was the precipitate of the former, not vice versa.  “Before the building, the architect,” he liked to say.

Among John’s interests—based upon Steiner’s ideas of a threefolded ordering of society—were a vigorous defense of human liberty in cultural affairs, especially the pursuit of freedom in education; a strong push for equal rights in the political sphere, including legal protections for the natural environment; and a deep-seated dedication to the ideals of social collaboration in commercial economic activity.  As a Waldorf teacher and school leader, however, his primary focus was on the physical, psychological, and spiritual phases of human development, from earliest childhood to full adult maturity, and he wrestled mightily with the spiritual significance in education of what Rudolf Steiner called the “Cosmic Christ” or “Christ Impulse”.

In his seminars and study groups with adults, John was known for his brilliant exegesis of Rudolf Steiner’s foundational text, originally published in German as Die Philosophie der Freiheit and later translated into English under various titles. This book served as cornerstone of the teacher training program at the Waldorf Institute for Liberal Education, a Master’s degree program that John founded and led in conjunction with the Department of Education at Adelphi University adjacent to the campus of the Garden City school.

At the same time, John was a fiercely independent and disciplined thinker intent on awakening the cognitive capacities of his students and colleagues. Sometimes he appeared more interested in provoking a critical response to his ideas than in winning ready acquiescence to them. Indeed, there were moments when he explicitly stated this to be his intention. It was even said of him that in later years he turned away from anthroposophy. Quite to the contrary, he insisted right to the end of his life that, far from distancing himself from Rudolf Steiner, he was actually trying to gain closer access—he called it “the direct approach”––to the spiritual realms that Steiner had mapped out. While often openly critical of other students of Steiner, John professed lasting confidence in the indwelling wisdom of anthroposophy, or spiritual science.

A prescient teacher

Despite his responsibilities as full-time Faculty Chair, John Gardner taught four main lessons during my years at the Garden City school – three on human biology plus a celebrated course for high school seniors on the American transcendentalists. In seventh grade, as part of the prescribed Waldorf science curriculum, we could have expected to have taken the first of three successive courses or “main lessons” with him on physiology—one each year—devoted to the health of the various human bodily systems. However,  in a surprise move, he replaced the traditional syllabus for our biology main lesson that year with a brand-new course based on a series of articles that had just appeared during the summer in The New Yorker magazine. They were excerpts from a book, published a few months later, that would revolutionize how today we perceive the planet Earth.

The year was 1962, and the author was Rachel Carson, whose articles and subsequent book, Silent Spring, are now widely credited with having eventually galvanized the American environmental movement.

As seventh graders, we must have been among the first elementary school pupils anywhere in the world to have studied the results of Carson’s investigations. Only decades later did I learn that in her research for this ground-breaking book, Carson had relied heavily upon evidence gathered and sent to her by Marjorie Spock, a biodynamic farmer and eurythmist living on Long Island who had worked together with John Gardner, first at the Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan, and later, during the 1950s, as a faculty member of the Garden City school. Through his association with her, John Gardner was alerted early on to Carson’s documentation of the looming ecological disaster caused by the poisoning—partly inadvertent and partly deliberate––of the environment, notably by  the spraying of DDT on Marjorie Spock’s own biodynamic farm.

Years before the stark conclusions of Silent Spring were finally accepted, John recognized the severity of this unfolding crisis and responded with pre-emptive pedagogical practices, starting with the reconfiguration of our seventh grade main lesson. Further inspired by Rachel Carson’s book, but also drawing upon his own experience in forestry and farming, John instituted student programs to care for the grounds and gardens of the Garden City school, including the preparation of organic compost, well before these practices became part of mainstream culture. Later, in another socially conscious innovation, he arranged for daily clean-up work crews, led by the students, to care for the interior spaces of the school, as well.

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A further example of his prescience: I recall John Gardner devoting one of our weekly high school forums in 1966 to the shocking story of a college student and ex-Marine who had ascended to the observation deck atop the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin a few months earlier and for 96 minutes had sprayed the campus below with some 150 rounds of ammunition, killing 14 passersby at random. With no hint of sensationalism, John Gardner predicted that shootings and similar acts of violence—having neither overt rational motive nor specific emotional attachment nor deliberately willed target—would in future become a common occurrence, and that their chilling effects would need to be treated with pedagogical insight rather than with punitive outrage.

Events of this kind, he said, would represent a new phenomenon in which human beings, whether in moments of crisis or breakdown, would begin to suffer from thoughts, feelings, and deeds that bore no relation one to another. They could take the form of streaming thoughts, pursued for their own sake without reference to feelings or purpose; or unhinged emotional outbursts, accompanied by neither cognitional meaning nor volitional direction; or deeds, mostly violent, enacted without emotional attachment or rational explanation. These manifestations of human distress would need to be remedied with a more potent form of therapeutic education that would draw upon the healing effects of artistic practice, cognitive imagination, and meaningful manual labor.

In a similar vein, John foresaw beyond what would eventually be named a material ‘energy crisis’ (due to shrinking reserves of fossil fuels) a more fundamental spiritual energy crisis of dwindling human will. These reserves of human strength, he felt, were being drained at the level of the spirit by an emphasis in conventional education on dry and abstract intellectuality, and at the level of soul by the seductive lure of passive sensual stimulation in place of active imaginative creativity.

A playful teacher

To the world at large John Gardner could present a stern, even fierce appearance.  And like many a man of oak-like stature, he could cast a long shadow. But behind the closed door of an elementary classroom or high school assembly hall, one occasionally glimpsed a more playful side to John. Apart from his depictions of nature’s symbiotic wisdom as documented in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I will not forget the day he pranced about the seventh grade room imitating various animals: the swift-eyed eagle, the deeply-roaring lion, the cud-chewing cow, and (my favorite) the slow-swaying sloth—so sleepy and impervious to external impressions that not even the report of a shotgun, we were told, could startle it. A Noah’s Ark of the imagination paraded before our eyes that morning.

In high school, during the annual “Literary Gourmet” banquet,  we were treated to John and a line-up of fellow teachers twirling their canes and doffing their straw boater hats in a spirited cabaret of song and dance, punctuated by a string of rapid-fire one-liners.

And finally, in John’s legendary twelfth grade course on American literature, the ensouled archetypes of eagle, lion, and bull lived once again in the classroom, only this time not through their physical and comic enactment but through the sober writings of their metaphysical spokesmen: the sharp-eyed epigrams of Emerson’s essays, the leonine struggles of Captain Ahab on the tempestuous high seas of Melville’s Moby Dick, the bovine ruminations of Whitman’s unending Leaves of Grass. Each of these John brought vividly to life, then combined them into a picture of the whole human being. Several decades later the content of this main lesson became the basis of John’s critically acclaimed  book, American Heralds of the Spirit.

A perspicacious teacher

Especially for those interested in becoming teachers,  whether in a Waldorf school or some other educational setting, John Gardner’s advice was: “Let your students become your teachers!”—what the Ancient Greeks invocted as the practice of metanoia.  John himself had the uncanny ability to discern, as though from the inside, what a student was attempting to put into words. He would listen silently, without showing any sign of agreement or encouragement, to a student’s often inchoate statement or observation, then turn it around in a single sentence that expressed precisely what the student had been trying to say.

There were times when he seemed to be able to intuit his students’ thoughts even without their having voiced them. On one such occasion, I remember musing silently to myself during one of his main lessons on the transcendentalists that what I really needed to do was to take some time away from school—indeed, from society altogether—in order to figure out for myself a particular  moral conundrum I was wrestling with. In that same instant, as though capturing my unspoken thought, John said to the class, “And if any one of you thinks you can simply go off on your own like some kind of hermit, isolated from society, in order to think your way out of a problem, you are bound to end up a dry intellectual materialist.”

Roughly a decade later, when I was attending graduate school at the University of Dallas (thanks in part to his suggestion), a group of us persuaded John to pay a visit and address a seminar of education majors at the University. John began by describing how teachers need to think of their vocation not simply as an instructional process of filling up students with stuff they do not know, but rather as a Socratic process of drawing forth from them what they already know in the depths of their spiritual being but have not yet raised to consciousness.

In a light-hearted aside, John explained to these prospective teachers the significance of an educator’s classroom desk, more precisely of its central drawer. It is imperative, he insisted, that the teacher carefully prepare at home every evening for the next school day —first, by inwardly picturing each student in the class and, second, by outlining the sequence of the forthcoming lesson with organized notes and detailed instructions for exercises. These would be carried to school the following morning and gently slipped into the desk drawer before the students arrived. Then, having settled the class, the teacher should begin to read the lesson off the faces of the students as one might read from a teleprompter—except for the fact that they might prompt a lesson quite different from the one the teacher had prepared the night before! The important thing, he concluded with a smile, was that at some level the students would now be educating the teacher, rather than the teacher ‘instructing’ the students: a radical case of pedagogical metanoia.

Concerning  this anthology

John Gardner devoted the greater portion of his writings and talks to the progressive unfoldment of the learning process. This theme is sounded through virtually all of essays contained in this anthology, many of which were previously unavailable to the general reading public since they were either published privately or limited to the readership of the Garden City school’s monthly newsletter.

Though a dynamic and compelling lecturer, John preferred especially in later years to eschew prepared remarks. Instead, he would solicit comments from around the room to a leading question, scribble and loosely group responses on the blackboard, step back to ponder them in silence, and only then begin to weave a unified tapestry out of the separate strands he had just gathered from individual members of his audience.

Although a few scripts in this anthology were initially given as lectures, interviews, or commencement addresses, most were written with a reader in mind. Akin to the writings of Emerson, John’s essays have an epigrammatic quality that proceed not by argument intended to persuade, but rather by ringing statements intended to resonate. Like singing into a piano, his statements echo in the soul to the degree the reader has lifted the dampers from the strings. His appeal is to intuition and common sense rather than to abstract theory or logical deduction. For example, the essay that opens this present anthology can be read less as a blueprint for social reform and more as an inspirational declaration or clarion call for a tri-une society, in which cultural, political, and above all economic conflicts are not so much fought as transcended.  For him, sounding an ideal is sometimes more important than rallying supporters to defend it.

And like the transcendentalists he so admired, John delights in upturning “ruts of conventional thought”, as Rudolf Steiner would say. In one of his shorter essays on the practice of education,  for instance, John extols the merits of forgetting, as a way to counter-balance  the emphasis that schools place all too easily upon the importance of remembering; in another, he calls out the assumptions of a consumer society driven by the profit motive by deftly sketching an economic system built on the ideal of  “giving” rather than on the motive of  “getting”.

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Lumberjack, farmer, gardener—author, speaker, advocate—teacher, mentor, counselor—idealist, environmentalist, anthroposopher:[1] John Gardner was an exceptionally skilled and disciplined practitioner in each of these outer professions and inner pursuits. Like the famed sphinx of Egyptian and Greek mythology, he brought together crystalline, winged insights from out of lofty realms; courageous, daring excursions into controversial arenas; quiet, pastoral ruminations about profound mysteries of living and dying.  And upon all of these, he bestowed a noble, upright human profile.

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Himself a graduate of the Waldorf school in Garden City, NY, Douglas Gerwin, Ph.D.,  is Executive Director of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education.  A teacher of history, literature, German, music, and life science at the university and Waldorf high school level since 1983, he is author/editor of eleven books, as well as numerous articles and webinars, on Waldorf education and anthroposophy.

[1] Just as a student of philosophy (in German, of Philosophie)  is rightly called “a philosopher” (in German, ein Philosoph), so  a student of anthroposophy (in German, of Anthroposophie) should rightly be called “an anthroposopher” (as is the case in German, ein Anthroposoph), rather than what is commonly translated into English as “an anthroposophist”. This latter misleading translation implies the existence of some kind of doctrine that should be called “anthroposophism”  —  as distinct from anthroposophy, which, like the term philosophy,  simply denotes a disciplined form of enquiry.   On this view, we can say that a materialist subscribes to the basic tenets of materialism, a spiritualist to the basic tenets of spiritualism, as so forth. Said briefly: to identify someone as an  “-ist” of any philosophic pursuit implies an “-ism” or system of beliefs that the follower of this “-ism” is, so to speak, “-isting”  — that is to say, accepting  without serious challenge. This assumption directly contradicts what Rudolf Steiner would expect of any student who engages in a disciplined  study of anthroposophy.  Hence the choice of the term “anthroposopher”.