What happens when you take an educational system and base its teachings upon those of an occultist and clairvoyant,

renowned for his pseudoscience, pseudo-history, and his founding of a spiritualist movement called Anthroposophy?

The man was the mystic Rudolf Steiner, and the schools today found all over the world

are the Waldorf schools. That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

A still life sits under a suburban street lamp. Three eggs, drizzled in honey, and it still smells like incense.

Is it magic, witchcraft, or prayer?

I'm Heather Freeman.

Join me as we meet the everyday Americans who've remixed magic, religion, and spirituality for over 400 years.

Listen to magic in the United States, wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

Waldorf Schools

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience,

real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing

what's real and what's not.

Private schools of all types abound.

Many are religious, a few are secular. Some are intended to be

intensely academic. Some allow free play, and the students can do whatever they like. Then there are

some like Montessori schools that follow a certain method. And then there are the Waldorf schools,

which have a reputation for being not only the most expensive, but also hippie-ish.

They grow crops, they dance and paint, they learn practical skills like building, they shun vaccines, they follow astrology.

It's how you'd imagine Silicon Valley elites would alleviate their white liberal guilt by putting their

children in touch with holistics and nature and spiritualism and the evils of capitalism and screen

...