This reflection aims to address the teaching of history in Brazilian schools recognized under the Waldorf designation.¹ To this end, it seeks to understand the philosophical foundations that support the chain of historical facts presented at a fundamental level in the aforementioned schools. Next, it compares these foundations with current academic conceptions for the writing of history, and, finally, it discusses Rudolf Steiner's theories perspectives about the human sciences to problematize approach the possibilities that work with the humanities points to contemporary subjectivity and culture.

Regarding the presentation of historical facts in Waldorf schools, it is clear that it is based on a very traditional conception. In a book with wide circulation in Waldorf teacher training environments, read in RICHTER, 2002, p. 34²:

History teaching must begin when the child becomes capable of detaching themselves from the specific moment in which they live and developing images of the past, through a certain pictorial concreteness. The appropriate time is between 11 and 12 years old. Thus, 5th year students get to know historical images of the lives of eastern peoples, that is, historical events from ancient India, ancient Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. In the 6th year, they learn about the history of the Romans and the Middle Ages, thus understanding the historical-cultural transformations that occurred in Europe, for example, through the Crusades (it is worth highlighting the aspect of causality!). «The West was quite behind the East. What then developed so well as industrial activity in the cities of Italy, and even in cities further north, was due to the Crusades. In this way it is possible to evoke images of the spiritual progress of civilization at that time (apud, STEINER, R., GA 285, 08/28/1919)».

Next, the text suggests dealing with the Modern Age in the 7th year, highlighting the voyages of discovery and the meeting of European cultures with the Americas, Africa and Asia, as well as the Protestant movements and the European scientific revolution. To complete the elementary education course, the recommendation points to contemporary times as content for the 8th year grade.

Some widely known pedagogical laws are presented in the proposition described above, among them is the suggestion that history should start from the awareness of individuality and progressively reach the world, that is, from the micro of the family, neighborhood, city, etc. for the macro of the country, continent, hemisphere and, therefore, the planet. Another fundamental pedagogical law – present in the aforementioned curriculum concept – is found in the repetition of phylogenesis through ontogenesis, in other words: the correspondence between the development of cognition with the historically established civilizing process.

Another notable element in this section of the curriculum proposal is the fact that the beginning of history corresponds to what the most traditional historiography presents as the dawn of civilized life: the path of the fertile crescent that starts from India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and reaches the Greco-Roman West.

Finally, the curriculum suggestion culminates with the excerpt in which Steiner proposes that technical progress should be encouraged to represent human spiritual development.

This approach seems to remain attached to the most traditional canons of historical discourse. It evokes a linear, chronological and evolutionary time that would culminate in the human conquest of civilization, as established, for example, by Herbert Spencer (1939). In the work Progress – its law and its cause , the author proposes an affinity between the organic evolution of animals and the progress of human societies under the aegis of the single law according to which everything would evolve from the homogeneous towards the heterogeneous. Thus, the oldest societies would be considered backward in relation to the societies closest to the present, whose organization would include them among the advanced ones. Such a conception leads Spencer to suggest that «progress is not an accident, it is not subject to human power, – but, rather, it is a beneficial necessity» (SPENCER, 1939, p. 98).

The same perspective that presents humanity evolving according to the determination of nature, whose processes would be guided by general and universal principles, can be found in the article Idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view by Immanuel Kant (1986). This approach establishes that the search for a social organization based on a legal constitution guaranteeing security and happiness would be inscribed in human nature. Therefore, the march towards civilization would be a record imprinted on the natural order of societies. In this sense, the evolution of human societies towards perfection would be inscribed in a kind of hidden plan of nature, the realization of which would come inexorably, revealing that the achievement of human happiness would be a purpose inscribed in its own history.

The historical conception according to which there is a human nature, whose primordial law is evolution, has organized, since the 19th century, what was conventionally applied in Brazilian schools as a history curriculum. Different manuals, entrance exam notices and official documents established a historical chronology in which humanity would have originated in the Near East and developed towards Western Europe, having produced there the bases of rational thought, the rule of rights and erudite culture.

In this conception, the very idea of reason, politics and culture emerged in Western humanity and motivated the process of European political-economic expansion that enabled military, epistemological and social colonization in which Europe's civilizing mission was used as a reference to describe the different cultural manifestations across the globe.

Therefore, the historical perspective that presents the origin of humanity in the Near East and, after a continuous sequence of facts, formed the first great civilizations that spread across Central Europe and produced the first States of rights, has been present in the Brazilian school context since when these educational institutions made the history curriculum official.

Criticism of this chain of historical contents is not new, but, even under review, the paradigm of a linear, progressive and Eurocentric history remains in school culture.

Although the writing of history underwent major transformations in the 20th century, school benches continued to harbor a deterministic and universalist way of approaching the past.

In the 1930s, with the work of thinkers gathered around the French magazine Annales , the approach to historical discourse underwent fundamental reconfigurations. When discussing the traditional expression according to which «history is made with texts» (FEBVRE, 1989, p. 16), Lucien Febvre suggested that it was necessary to broaden our view of the records left by human passage on Earth. Thus, the sequences established by the events documented in the offices where peace and war treaties were decided, political regulations, battle chronicles, marriage agreements were questioned in favor of the human marks left in the architecture of houses, in fields of cultivation, in religious ceremonies. Finally, new records of human action were sought and, at the same time, new temporalities were established to explain different decisions of the different characters that came to influence, whether in the short duration of political events or in the long duration of cultural, artistic, religious, symbolic etc.

This new way of writing history also changed the relationship between the past and the present. Fernand Braudel, a selfless representative of the second generation of the Annales, went so far as to state «that it is from what we currently see that we evaluate and understand the past» (BRAUDEL, 1987, s/p). Thus, the infinite temporalities existing in a geographic space such as the Mediterranean Sea, for example, could be visualized and the linearity of events was diluted in the numerous possibilities of contemplation that opened up to the historical gaze. At the same time, the sequences of cause and effect to determine human attitudes also lost meaning. Thus, attention began to be paid to the intentions assumed by the actors of the events and less to the reasons established by the narrators of their actions.

In the itinerary of renewal of historical discourse, the 1970s saw the emergence of new history : the third generation of the Annales. Heir to the implosion of the authority attributed to official texts, due to the elimination of the causal linearity of time and, now, focused on new problems and new objects (LE GOFF and NORA, 1995), História Nova started to highlight the representations expressed in myths, in ceremonies, in literature, in legends, in cuisine, in short, in local everyday manifestations that allowed historians to access the mentality of a certain people at a certain time. The idea was then to replace the old general history with a total history that encompassed the symbolic foundations for the individual motivations of the different historical characters.

In addition to criticizing the methods of traditional history produced by the Annales, the reconfiguration of historical discourse also discussed the power relations typical of all enunciation about society. In this aspect, it was contemporary thinkers inspired by Nietzsche, particularly Michel Foucault, who produced the most acidic criticisms of the linear, progressive and causal way of writing history.

In a class given at the Collège de France on March 17, 1976 (FOUCAULT, 1999), Foucault summarized his analyzes about the relationship between the emergence of human sciences in the 19th century and the mechanisms of knowledge-power arranged by the scientific reading of society. In this context, the French author asserted that «each time there was confrontation, condemnation to death, struggle, risk of death, it was in the form of evolutionism that one was forced, literally, to think about them» (FOUCAULT, 1999, p. 307). Supported by the conception that – since the dawn of Western nineteenth-century science – philosophical statements produced regarding a given object have always presented themselves as carriers of a scientific truth, Foucault evokes Nietzsche's meanings to assert that such statements operated in terms of a will to true. Thus, by naming their facts, by instituting explanations, by constructing chains of facts and by proposing references of normality, the discourses of the human sciences have always dedicated themselves to conjuring the dangers that they themselves established.

Particularly, in the case of the regulations of the States of rights formed after the French revolution, the thinker asserts that the theories produced in the fields of law, geography, sociology, demography, medicine, biology and history served as a support for government decisions aimed at controlling the large population groups that the industrial system made it possible to gather in large cities. The motto of this control was the incentive for each member of the population to seek to follow the rules so that their membership in the continuity of the species was guaranteed. In this way, it operated with the amalgamation of biological foundations with individual responsibility for maintaining personal health, the adequacy of which revealed itself as an act desired by everyone who intended to be part of humanity.

It is observed that the linear, causal and evolutionary perspective is much more than a mere conception of history, it expresses a political position that opposes the defense of the existence of different temporalities, in which looking at the present guides the construction of the past and allows social scientists to reject deterministic laws to justify the decisions of historical characters. In one field of this dispute, the fight against epistemological centralization targets historical facts as marks of the will of humans in their respective times, in another the intention to elevate historical facts to the stature of established social conventions such as monuments.

With Nietzsche it can be assumed that the reaction to monumental history starts from the idea that established values must be criticized based on the search for the «conditions and circumstances in which they were born» (NIETZSCHE, 1988, p. 14), considering that «from of a common root, of something that commands in the depths, a fundamental will to knowledge that speaks with ever greater determination, demanding ever greater precision» (NIETZSCHE, 1988, p. 9). In this sense, the idea of knowledge – the arrival point of truth – can be replaced by the idea of knowing, since, if truth is an expression of a will to power, it frees the historian from the subject-object relationship, because, in this conception, «freedom is the being of truth and is the duty of the will». (FOUCAULT, 2014, p. 194). This idea of freedom led to what was conventionally identified as the insurrection of knowledge in the human sciences, that is, the implosion of great explanations based on general laws and, consequently, attention to local histories, in which the expression of the will to know of communities would allow producing an idea of society whose meanings could be assumed by the cultures themselves in search of their identities.

After this tour of some of the fundamental elements in the constitution of a writing of history that is contrary to the notions of determinism, linearity and universalism, it is possible to return to the curriculum suggestion highlighted by Tobias Richter at the beginning of this text.

As it is presented, the chain of content proposed by Richter refers to the logic in force in many history curricula to date applied in different school models in Brazil. However, if this proposal is involved in the worldview developed by Rudolf Steiner, the approach of the human sciences may be very far from any determinisms, universalisms or progressivisms characteristic of traditional models of writing history.

Regarding the deterministic view of knowledge, it can be said that, observing Steiner's philosophical meanings, the author is very far from this perspective when he begins to analyze human actions. He is enchanted by Goethe's worldview regarding the scientific study of nature and seeks to create a theory of knowledge based on it. Steiner sees in the way Goethe produces explanations for the natural world, a way to position humans as active beings in the face of their own knowing nature.

In this sense, Steiner follows Goethe's considerations about the need to produce different approaches to different natural phenomena. Note that, in the case of the inorganic sphere, the absolute congruence between concept and phenomenon is visible; In this context, the juxtaposition between perception and thought is even recognizable. On the other hand, when it comes to the organic sphere, Steiner's reading of Goethe leads him to suggest the need to develop another approach, since, to juxtapose the concept of a living being with its phenomenal manifestation, it would be necessary to reduce this being to a mechanism in which the general laws of functioning of an individual were capable of explaining all the manifestations of living beings of the same type. In the first case – in the inorganic scope – one could speak of determinism, but in the second, it would no longer be possible. The situation becomes more complex when it comes to understanding human attitudes, as

processes of nature are therefore distinguished from human actions by the following: in the former, the law must be considered as a background that conditions apparent existence; In human actions, existence itself is the law and reveals itself to be determined by nothing but itself. Every process in nature unfolds into something that determines and something that is determined, and the latter necessarily follows from the former; in contrast, human action determines itself. But this is acting with freedom. (STEINER, 1984, p.115, italics in the original)

Steiner sees in Goethe a thinker capable of bringing together the two great philosophical trends of his time: idealism and empiricism, as the German writer, according to Steiner's reading, proposes that idea and experience are founded within the subject in search of knowledge. This elision of the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity establishes an active position of thought in relation to the will to know. For both authors, all cognition arises from human dissatisfaction with what they cannot explain in the world. Therefore, for this worldview, knowing means making ideas about the being of things emerge from the depths of the human being.

Still in the case of the human sciences, Steiner's philosophical perspective is far from any universalism, because, if the production of knowledge arises from the individual search for the explanation of the world and is anchored in the confidence in slipping into the essence of the phenomenon investigated, each thinking being has the possibility of proposing a perspective to unravel the mystery contained in the world of phenomena. In other words, in this conception, the process of knowledge would be enlivened each time someone dedicated themselves to establishing an intimate relationship with an object to be known. Furthermore, if this object is a human, the search for recognition of the reasons for their actions becomes an update of the very idea of being human, since in the externalization of the behavior of the being investigated lies the path to recognizing the idea of being human for them.

In this sense, there would not be a human being always present. Each action can be taken as a trail to access the idea of humanity present in everyone.

By discarding determinism and universalism, Steiner's conception of the human sciences also discards progressivism, since, according to the aforementioned worldview, the existence of a law that precedes any human action would not make sense. In his work Goethe's Cognitive Method , Steiner suggests that

If we manage to discover general laws for History, these will only be general to the extent that they have been proposed as goals or ideals by historical personalities. (...) For this reason, neither in History, whose object is man, is it permitted to speak of influences external to his actions, of ideas existing at the time, etc.; still less of a plan underlying it. History is nothing more than the development of human acts, opinions, etc. (...) Every a priori construction of plans that should underlie History is against the historical method resulting from the essence of History. (...) History must be completely based on human nature. It must capture your desires, your tendencies. Our gnosiological science completely excludes the attribution of a purpose to History, such as, for example, that men are educated to a higher degree of perfection from a lower one, etc. (STEINER, 2004, p.101-108, 109)

Faced with these reflections, the elementary school teacher may ask: but now, without a predetermined sequence of historical facts, without general laws to understand the development of societies, without a meaning for the evolution of events, what is left to teach?

This writing does not seek to completely eliminate any of these elements, as they are part of the school culture itself. The sole intention of this writing  is to free the educator from content that she or him may consider mandatory or even indispensable. At the same time it wants to eliminate any illusion of total history. The aim here is to draw attention to the fact that official history contains a will to truth that is also a will to power and the teacher needs to be aware of this.

Current discussions about the human sciences should inspire a deep and responsible relationship between the teacher and the object to be taught. It is necessary for the story to be conceived from a careful perspective on the community where it is being produced.

The appreciation of local narratives, the recognition of students' soul needs and the constant activation of creativity are basic requirements for history teaching to become an exercise in full and vigorous movement. Because, as Deleuze (1992) said, «history is what separates us from ourselves, and what we must transpose and cross to think about ourselves» (p. 119).

Marcelo Rito (Author in Portuguese)

English translation: Marina Bongioanni Rito