Waldorf education, as a conscious alternative to mainstream education, partly because of its outspoken ideas on personal development, recently started to globalize. This raises questions about how its educational principles and practices are adapted locally (Boland 2015; Hoffmann 2016). This paper addresses the complexity and friction of this process on the basis of an ethnographic case study in the Philippines. Early 20th century Waldorf education started off in central Europe. It was founded by the Austrian spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1919). Waldorf’s pedagogy focuses on broad personal development, in which importance is given to specific stages in life (Lievegoed 1987). Development is conceptualized according to the principal that “ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis” (Stehlik, 2018: 219), meaning that personal development follows the history of mankind. In the curriculum this principle is expressed in historical stories and images, in which students could recognize the struggles of their age. The Philippines offers a good example of a country where Waldorf education recently has obtained a foothold. The school that is central in this study opened in 2003. Like Waldorf schools elsewhere one of the dilemmas for the school is whether to copy a pre-existing Eurocentric curriculum or to develop a new, local version. Reformulating curricular aspects is considered difficult since it could affect the school’s core identity, in terms of the unity of its curriculum and its specific developmental theory. History classes in grade 7: ‘Being a discoverer or being discovered’ In Filipino Waldorf schools, as elsewhere in Waldorf schools, the 7th grader is typed ‘a discoverer’. At the age of 12 he or she is about to enter puberty, question the authority of parents and teachers, and start to think and judge for him- or herself. In history classes this developmental stage is mirrored in historical stories about 15th and 16th century Europe, about the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. But could Filipino students identify with Columbus and Magellan the way European students do? Are they the discoverers or the discovered in the stories? This is a precarious question in the hybrid cultural context of the Philippines. Teachers find it a problem difficult to cope with adequately, because so far none of the local equivalents seems to be a satisfactory alternative.

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