Bringing a universal impulse to Filipino localities: three biographies on the history of Waldorf education in the Philippines

Abstract

Based on three biographies of key actors, this article discusses the introduction of Waldorf education – an alternative educational approach rooted in an early twentieth-century European spiritual philosophy, called anthroposophy – in the Philippines. It examines which encounters, networks, ideas, articulations, and actions have been decisive in these biographies. It adopts a combined biographical and ethnographic approach, called ethnography of global connections (Tsing, 2005), focusing on concrete trajectories of globalizing projects in so-called zones of awkward engagement. Waldorf education in the Philippines can be seen as such a globalizing project, in which certain knowledge is presented as cosmopolitan and universally applicable and is advanced to new Filipino localities by enthusiastic school founders.