Introduction by David Barham

The lasting worth of a teacher is not measured by the number of books they have published, though David Sloan has published two of the definitive books for the English speaking Waldorf high school movement, Life Lessons: Reaching Teenagers Through Literature and Stages of Imagination: Working Dramatically With Adolescents, as well as three books of original poetry, Earth School, A Rising & Other Poems and  The Irresistible In-Between.

It is not the number of years they were in the classroom or the number of students they have reached, though David in his classes at Green Meadow Waldorf School, Shining Mountain Waldorf School, Maine Coast Waldorf School and Jamie York Academy as well 27 years (yes, 27!) teaching adult students in the English subject seminar and drama classes here in WHiSTEP, has taught hundreds of students in the close to 50 years that he has been a teacher.

What really matters is that though David loves the material he brings to his students- adolescents and adults alike – though he loves his tongue twisters, riddles, tennis ball games, drama exercises and masterfully planned lessons, what he really loves is hearing his students uncover meaning in scenes and texts, and really, finding meaning in themselves. David’s classes are elegant, messy, profound, human conversations, no Sage on the Stage is he (though Sage he is). The love that former students, my daughter included, have for David is that they feel, deeply, that he cares about them and their development, not just Homer or Wolfram von Eschenbach. When he meets them years later- and there are so many to meet- they feel upon the encounter, genuine warmth and interest in their story. David loves stories-  human stories.

It is no accident that perhaps the greatest and most lasting contribution David has made to Waldorf education and to this scared and sometimes lonely planet, is that he helped so many write their own Song of Themselves, to sound their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.

My colleague, my mentor, my Pickleball partner, and my dear friend, David Sloan.

Commencement Address: Center for Anthroposophy/Antioch University New England Commencement Exercises: July 27, 2025

Good morning graduating classes, dear colleagues, families and friends who have supported the individuals we are celebrating today. One of the dangers of inviting a teacher in the twilight of a career to speak is that he or she has an extensive backlog of experiences—decades upon decades—to draw upon; so over the next 4 ½ hours I’d like to share some of my favorite teaching moments. Actually, since I believe in the axiom that less is more, my less lofty goal is that at the end of the next 20 minutes or so, all of you and I will still be awake.

It goes without saying that when I started teaching at a Friends school in 1972—53 years ago if you really want to rub it in—the world was a much different place.  Back then if I wanted to make copies for my students, I would have to hand crank them out using a ditto machine that produced distinctively smelling sheets with slightly blurry purple text. These were simpler times, when TV and radio were the only media we had to worry about, and when a couple of hours of assigned homework a night did not seem like an unusual hardship imposed by a draconian taskmaster.  Back in those days, when parents had to be called in because their child had been naughty, their typical response was “What did Juniper do now?” instead of today’s “What did you teachers do to trigger my child?”

Of course, in other ways, the early 70’s resembled our political landscape today; a Republican president presided over an acutely polarized country, that included extreme division over conflicts abroad (think Viet Nam), and domestic— the Civil Rights, fledgling Women’s Liberation and Gay Rights movements. Scandal and corruption were rife (think Watergate), and environmental awareness was slowly seeping into people’s collective consciousness, thanks in part to the Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually bursting into flames in June of 1969 from industrial toxic waste.

I was fortunate to escape at least some of the political and cultural turmoil roiling the country when, after a two-year hiatus, I returned to Emerson College in Sussex, England back in 1974 to finish my teacher training. It was at Emerson that I had three revelatory, life-transforming experiences:

1.  I had already encountered and begun to tentatively bumble through some of Rudolf Steiner’s work, but frankly, whenever I picked up a lecture, I felt like a blind person groping my way across a roomful of furniture that had been moved.  I would constantly be knocking over floor lamps, bumping into table edges, and hard-to-grasp concepts that would invariably raise metaphorical bruises, as well as a vague sense that there were some deep and meaningful truths to uncover there. It was there that I first heard the simplest and clearest explanation of what this weird “Anthropo-sarcophagus” word represented, when one of my wise teachers stated that Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge aiming to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. It’s a little long for a bumper sticker or even an embroidered pillow, but that clear affirmation has stayed with me for the past five decades.
2. At Emerson I met a remarkable company of fellow seekers, many of whom returned to their homelands and became leaders in the worldwide Waldorf movement; some became lifelong friends.  I cannot promise that your cohort will prove to be as karmically connected as mine has been, but if you’re fortunate, someday you, too, may be able to call as singular an individual as Michael Holdrege a friend, colleague and golf buddy for over half century.  I might add that as an unexpected bonus, I met my future wife that year at Emerson.  More on her in a bit.
3. The third life-changing experience I had at Emerson College was to have access to some of the most extraordinary teachers this side of Ancient Greece.  These names might not mean much to you young ‘uns, but the pantheon included luminaries such as Francis and Elisabeth Edmunds, John Davy, Adam Bittleston, Molly von Heider, Michael and Roswitha Spence, and George Locher, who became such a long-time pillar of this program, Many of them were just one generation removed from Rudolf Steiner’s wide-ranging initiatives, and they carried his work forward in the most inspired ways. Before that year I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a Waldorf teacher.  After that, I was sure I had found my calling; I became, as my three very un-anthroposophical brothers were fond of saying, a confirmed Waldork.

Fast forward to just a few years ago, when I experienced something akin to a spiritual crisis, arising out of the anguish caused by the pandemic.  I had been grappling with the thorny question of how long I could continue to teach current/future teachers after stepping back from the classroom myself.

So, as I often did when we were colleagues for over 25 fruitful years at Green Meadow Waldorf School in New York, I turned to my dear friend John Wulsin, who passed away this past December.  I shared my doubts with him about this powerful new impulse to reconsider the signature courses of the Waldorf high school. I told him I understood the need to constantly review and, if necessary, to overhaul and revitalize a hundred-year-old curriculum; I clearly recalled Torin Finser’s reminder at a conference several years ago celebrating the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919, when he cited a statement made by Rudolf Steiner: As a movement or institution ages—up to 100 years—it either dies or needs re-founding on a new basis.   But I also shared with John Wulsin how concerned I was about throwing the babies out with the bathwater—replacing these foundational authors I’d taught for decades: Homer, Shakespeare, Dante—with more contemporary writers.  He listened to my lament, then boiled it all down to two crystal-clear sentences.  He said, “You know as well as I that there are elements of every curriculum that must be timely, that reflect the times we live in.  However, he said, we must also remember that there are also elements that are timeless, and that speak to young people across generations, and we need to protect and promote such works.

His words summed up a whole career’s worth of striving.  How can we strike that balance between the timely and timeless?  This leads me to what I suppose might be considered the “advice-giving” portion of this talk, which I am loath to deliver for two reasons: 1) No one ever remembers the advice that one graduation speaker or another has ever offered, and 2) Fellow Mainer Edna St. Vincent Millay took the words right out of my mouth when she wrote: “I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”

One of the productions I directed over the years, the wackiest of Thornton Wilder’s plays, The Skin of Our Teeth also mentions mistakes. Near the end, the archetypal patriarch of the Antrobus family, having survived an ice age, a great flood and a great war, remembers his beloved books, when he says to his wife of 5000 years,

Oh, I’ve never forgotten that living is struggle.  I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home or a country.  All I ask is the chance to build new worlds and God has always given us that second chance and he has given us. . .voices to guide us, and the memory of our mistakes to warn us.

He then gratefully calls to mind some of his favorite authors, who have served as beacons for him and for all of humanity.  With that same gratitude, I would like to cite one piece of literature I’ve taught high school students and teacher trainees over the years that has stood out.

That timeless narrative is the Medieval story of Parzival.  Now on the one hand I can understand why some teachers might question the relevance of teaching an 800-year-old tale. As they might pointedly charge, In Parzival, the title character kills his cousin with a spear because Parzival wants his armor, assaults a naked lady and takes her ring, deserts his wife after impregnating her, renounces God, nearly slays fellow knight Gawain, compels the Grail King to live in acute agony for years because the lad is too self-absorbed to ask a simple question, and is then rewarded with the kingship of the Grail.  And we want 17-year-olds reading this story because….?

And if I were in my rare higher self mode, I would patiently, dispassionately answer that it’s just because of all those horrible mistakes that we should be introducing our students to Parzival.  He is initially the ultimate blunderer; in the most important moment of his young life, he fails miserably to express the empathy that would have magically healed the grievously wounded Grail King.  Thankfully, once he is publicly shamed into awareness of his mistake, he spends the next several years striving to make amends for his failure.

What a great lesson for those of us today—students and grownups alike—who go to great lengths to avoid the appearance of failing at anything.  Perhaps we might rather embrace our failures, in C.S. Lewis’ words, as bumps “on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

I could cite so many other inspirational, transformative plays, books, poems I’ve been privileged to teach, from A to Z—Ann Frank to Zora Neale Hurston, Basho to Wendell Berry, the Mahabharata to Moby Dick, Faust to Frost, Sappho to Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn. However, we need to come back to the paradox that John Wulsin framed; how do we keep Waldorf education supple, current, timely in our turbulent and fractured world?

So instead of offering any specific but debatable curricular modifications, I’d rather focus on qualities we Waldorf teachers may need to cultivate—call it advice if you must—as we face the challenges in the next decades.

In one generation, the technological revolution has upended and transformed all our lives; now we get to grapple with both the allure and the unimaginable power of A.I. that is already erasing the lines between reality and illusion, and between human beings and machines.  Steiner warned about the “mechanization of the spirit.” So the first qualities I would urge us to cultivate are clarity and creativity in our own thinking, and not to cede to some shadowy artificial intelligence the rightful work of our own imaginations. It’s so tempting to push a button and receive an instantaneous lesson plan or research paper or song that sounds as if Taylor Swift wrote it, but results without effort bypass those instructive failures and Parzival’s many missteps.

Another threat that’s become more widespread in recent years is what I would call a growing obsession with “self-concern.” It takes two forms: 1) on the one hand, a kind of “What’s in it for me?” approach to life that emanates from the uppermost reaches of our institutions and that places self-interest and self-promotion above all else; 2) The second  expression of this self-concern has really been on full display since the pandemic, and it is the undeniable surge in anxiety. Back in the 18th century Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, his argument against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate. What we seem to be experiencing these days instead is a social contraction. To many, the world feels like a dangerous place, so one of the obvious fear-based reactions has been to crank up our personal drawbridges, shut the gates, and just live with the inevitable, increasing sense of isolation.

To counteract this contraction I would suggest that we need to lower our drawbridges, and develop in ourselves and in our students more empathy for others.  My wife Christine once put it this way:  If Steiner is correct that we are all spiritual beings, then every conversation we have with another person is potentially a spiritual encounter.  Seen in that light, such interactions can acquire an appropriately sacred quality, deepen our connection with other human/spiritual beings, and make it so much easier to feel for and with them.  So we might remind ourselves to be grateful for the difficult colleague, for the unruly student, even for the occasionally cranky spouse.  And to underscore the importance of empathy for our teaching, I want to share a sentence from my own teacher training days, when Eileen Hutchins—who wrote a brilliant short introduction to Parzival, wrote, “The awakening of sympathetic understanding among young people is more important than all the factual knowledge you can cram in them.”  

The last quality I would highlight is akin to the attribute Karine cited in her thoughtful address two weeks ago, when she spoke about fortitude.  I would concur that in these challenging times, we need fortitude and its cousin, courage, to represent the highest ideals that Waldorf has to offer.  Let’s be frank; these are not normal times we’re living through.  When folks feel imperiled, it seems as if they have two choices: 1) go along to get along, or 2) resist and risk retribution.  The first reminds me of one of Bob Dylan’s lines:  “People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”  I suspect there will be a whole lot of repenting going on in the coming years, but I’m also hopeful that at least in the Waldorf movement, we will exercise the courage to stand up for our convictions.  More than ever, Waldorf education offers an antidote to mechanization of the spirit, to the retreat into self-interest, and to the faintheartedness we see in too many quarters. 

As I finish up here, I realize I’m not really breaking any new ground. Frank L. Baum beat me to the punch 125 years ago, when his classic The Wizard of Oz appeared in 1900. I had always wondered if Baum, who was a contemporary of Rudolf Steiner, might have crossed paths with Steiner.  There doesn’t seem to have been any direct contact, but they certainly appear to have shared a similar understanding of the threefold human being.  Baum’s Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion each vividly embody those qualities I would wish for you and your future students; active, independent discerning minds, hearts yearning for real human connection, and the steadfast fortitude and courage to safeguard those Waldorf ideals we know can bring much needed light into the world.

Rudolf Steiner also foresaw how important these soul forces would be for teachers and students alike when he gave the first faculty of that first Waldorf school a verse that has been shared by teachers for over a century:

Imbue thyself with the power of imagination

Have courage for the truth

Sharpen thy feeling for responsibility of soul

I feel it is my final responsibility for your souls to wish you all the best, and the best includes a visit to Brunswick, ME where you might enjoy the soul-sweetening culinary offerings of the best Gelateria in Maine! If you only remember one piece of advice this morning, it’s “Follow the gelato!”