It is not only anthroposophical curative education that needs updating today. For some years now, experts have been questioning the concept of curative education, which was coined in the early 1860s. It has since become quite controversial, as it implies that a person must or can be cured or must somehow be «healed» – in the sense of «made whole» – through educational intervention. This places the cause of the disability solely in the person, while ignoring the fact that many aspects of disability only arise as a result of the respective social conditions. Of course, a categorizing diagnosis is sometimes necessary, for example for therapeutic purposes. Nevertheless, this entails the risk of an ascriptive and possibly also deficient perception of people, who are then constructed as needy, while their abilities and resources fade into the background or are not perceived at all. In this context, I also take a critical view of the term «need for spiritual care» used in anthroposophical organizations. This is because it also forms a separate category for people with assistance needs and focuses primarily on an assumed neediness. If anything, it should be asked whether not all people could benefit from a certain «care of the soul».
In any case, all people have an inherent need and ability to participate in social life, regardless of their characteristics such as a disability or mental illness. Society must therefore be designed in such a way that people can participate in it and develop their uniqueness instead of having to submit to more or less arbitrarily set standards as a precondition for belonging. With this different perspective, the focus of attention is no longer on what a person cannot do, but on the contrary on what abilities and resources they have to help shape their biography and social life.
Another key concept in this context is empowerment. This means that the task of professionals is not to help a person to develop towards a non-disabled norm, but to assist them in such a way that they can access their own potential in the best possible way and develop in a self-determined way. Because even if a person cannot live their life independently, in other words without assistance, they can still shape it in a self-determined way.
From this perspective, a person with a disability is no longer described as categorically different from all other people. This consequently leads to the idea of inclusion. This recognizes that every person is a centrally important member of society and that society must develop structurally in such a way that participation is also possible if a person requires assistance to shape their life. This does not yet answer the question of how this can be implemented. However, it would be wrong to describe inclusion as unfeasible from the outset because the framework conditions are not yet appropriate. It is the responsibility of politicians to provide the resources for this, given that Germany ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, 15 years ago.
But what does all this mean for the centenary of anthroposophically inspired curative education? Just as the concept of curative education leads to certain questions, so too does the concept of anthroposophy within education and the social sector.
In my book Kreis und Punkt. A Critical Analysis of Rudolf Steiner's Curative Education Course, which will be published by Info3 in autumn 2024, I have therefore deliberately decided to speak of «anthroposophically inspired curative and inclusive education» because it does not seem easy to me to define categorically or unambiguously what «anthroposophical» curative and inclusive education is and what it is not. On the other hand, when I speak of inspired, it is clear that it is a pedagogy that draws inspiration from the curative education course and the practice that has developed since then, without subscribing to everything that has happened and been developed since then.
Steiner and curative education
Among Steiner's ideas on the situation of people in need of assistance, there are elements that I still find inspiring today, as well as those that I consider to be problematic. His idea of a «fully intact spiritual form» communicated in a letter is essential (Steiner, letter to Willy Schlüter, July 12, 1915), and some of his statements in the curative education course indicate that Steiner's thinking was very modern in some respects. For example, he spoke of having no right to speak «about the normality or abnormality of ... soul life» (cf. Steiner, 2024, GA 317, p. 14) and emphasized how important it is for educators to reflect on themselves and their attitude, that genuine empathy is based, for example, on becoming aware of one's own sympathies and antipathies. With the point-circle meditation, he developed a central instrument for developing empathy for the situation of a counterpart and showed that we as human beings stand in tense polarity between spiritual-mental intention and physical-mental conditionality. The fact that the ego can bridge this gap and actively shape it and that both the point and the circle are just a different form of expression of the same reality is expressed in the following frequently cited sentence: «You must understand that a circle is a point, a point is a circle, and you must understand this completely from within.» (cf. Steiner, 2024, GA 317, p. 172).
On the other hand, some of Rudolf Steiner's «curative education» statements, diagnoses and therapies at the time must be viewed with a highly critical eye. I have described the situation of a family affected by this in the above-mentioned text. Steiner's statement that the education of children with a disability is «a profound intervention in the karmic activities that would otherwise take place between death and the next birth» and that one is thus «intervening in the work of the gods» (cf. Steiner, 2024, GA 317, p. 43) is also problematic in my view. Not only are children with a disability presented here as categorically different from all other children, but the statement also harbors the danger of an exaggerated self-image on the part of educators who adopt it. As a colleague recently asked me: «Does it have to be healing, can it be a little smaller and more loving?» Because even in the anthroposophical secondary literature and in the everyday discourse derived from it, images have developed over the decades that cannot remain the same. This includes, for example, the idea of an allegedly possible connection between «karmic guilt» and disability, which I believe is unacceptable, as described for example by Michaela Glöckler in her 2016 book Elternsprechstunde.
We are therefore working in a complex field with many exciting questions – especially for the professionals who work here. Special needs teachers, curative education nurses and curative educators work with people with a wide range of biographical challenges, including people who have experienced severe trauma. These professions require more than the desire to do something «good» and «help» those «in need». On the contrary, they are particularly fascinating because – as Steiner also explained in the curative education course – they require people to come to terms with their own conditionality, that is, their own biography, their own feelings and their own attributions, in such a way that a certain inner clarity and freedom of action emerge. Only with this prerequisite can a counterpart be accompanied in their development in the best possible way.