Waldorf Saratoga: Education & Faculty

The Quality of Waldorf Education

The portfolio of a typical Waldorf twelfth grader, often used for college admissions, reveals a great deal about Waldorf education. It displays a dazzling array of assignments and projects undertaken in the high school years, and may include, for instance, painstakingly rendered diagrams relating to problems in projective geometry; an essay arguing with Ralph Waldo Emerson's ideals in Self-Reliance; a photograph of a student-designed, handmade dulcimer, with a description of this woodworking project and of the lessons learned in the acoustics of a stringed instrument; a reflection on embryonic development from the point of view of the embryo; and summary and commentary, personal and historical, on artistic works ranging from Stravinsky's Firebird to Dante's Inferno to Melville's Moby Dick. The casual observer, however, is struck most forcefully by the quality of the presentation, its organization (including headings and tables of contents), its vivid and thoughtful writing, and its elaborate illustrations.

What journey has enabled this demonstration of intellectual depth, artistic refinement, imaginative scope? The journey that is Waldorf education begins in the earliest years, with a curriculum based on interdisciplinary, multisensory learning experiences reflecting a consistent, focused educational philosophy attuned to the developmental stages of childhood and adolescence. It is a journey unlike other educational journeys, and it reaps enormous rewards, for it seeks to shape the child from the first moment not merely intellectually, but also emotionally, physically, and even morally.

The Waldorf first grader, for instance, drops a small gemlike stone (earned through a kindness done, or a good deed performed)onto one side of an old-fashioned scale, attempting with her classmates to outweigh the world's evil, represented by the large rock on the opposite platform. How many gemstones, how many kindnesses, will it take to tip the balance? Through this exercise the child encounters not only basic laws of math and physics, but also the notion that ethical behavior has weight; she is encouraged not merely to observe in a cognitive manner, but also to consider and to act. This is the heart of Waldorf pedagogy: the education of the whole child, as a thinking but also a feeling and willing individual. This attentiveness to the child's fullest development in all phases of her emotional, spiritual, and intellectual life leads to the capacity for empathy, creativity, and academic excellence demonstrated by the portfolio of the twelfth grader.

A pedagogical system with such ambitious goals necessarily looks, sounds, and feels different from more mainstream types of education. Waldorf students, for example, are not dependent on textbooks written by educational experts; instead, they make many of their own learning materials, carefully transcribing into their lesson books the concepts presented by their teachers. They take subjects not typically found in other school systems, including eurhythmy and handwork, which hone physical abilities and sharpen mental focus; they also study German and French from the first grade onwards. Perhaps most important, they approach learning in a highly synthetic manner: Waldorf children do not separate music from math, or language arts from science, but are taught to see all subjects as interrelated, each one intensified and enriched through its resonances with other areas of learning. The class play, a highlight of each school year, is an especially strong demonstration of this interdisciplinary approach, since its content (fairy tales in the early years, stories from the ancient world in the middle years, perhaps a Shakespeare production in high school) reflects and extends the children's multilayered understanding of history, language, and the arts. Moreover, as in all aspects of Waldorf education, the class play attends to the children's growth from multiple angles, employing their capacities for thought, for movement, for emotional expression, and for cooperative interaction with others.

Perhaps the most visible distinguishing feature of the Waldorf philosophy is the attention devoted to the aesthetic sensibility. The Waldorf child, encouraged daily to sing, to dance, and to play musical instruments, and taught to render her lessons in beautiful calligraphy and with detailed illustrations, learns early that the quality of one's ideas cannot be separated from the quality of their expression. She learns to value the relation between form and content, and to take pride in presenting work that calls on her highest intellectual, physical, and artistic capacities. Her aesthetic sense is nurtured in virtually every arena of Waldorf life, from the toys she plays with in the preschool years, made from natural fiber and wood, to the painting, knitting, woodworking, and music lessons of the middle and later years-all of which invite her to engage her imagination, her volition, her powers of listening and of observation, and her sense of symmetry and grace. Even the discourse of the Waldorf classroom (including, for instance, the telling and retelling of fairy tales and ancient myths) emphasizes the depth and richness of language. In Waldorf thought, the child who is exposed early and continually to such bounties, immersed in the formal qualities of poetry, music, and the practical and decorative arts, comes not merely to appreciate beauty, but to aspire to it. Even more important, she comes to approach intellectual problems in deeply creative ways, drawing on long training, for instance, in the relation of whole to parts, and perceiving that successful solutions may require experimentation, imagination, and constant refinement.

It is not difficult to see that this system demands much from teachers. The typical Waldorf teacher, specially trained in Waldorf pedagogy, is accomplished in a wide variety of subject matters and is committed to an integrated model of learning based on a nuanced understanding of child development. Waldorf elementary teachers also accept the unusual and highly challenging role of guiding a single class from the first grade through the eighth grade, which fosters a stable bond between teacher and student and allows for a deep understanding of each child's needs. (Waldorf high school teachers focus on a specific discipline, as in a more traditional high school, although they remain dedicated to creative, interdisciplinary approaches.) The Waldorf teacher-compassionate, flexible, engaged and engaging-serves as an intellectual, emotional, and ethical role model for students, and is therefore dedicated to ongoing pedagogical study as well as an appreciation of the life of the spirit in the never-ending education of the human being.

Today's citizens must be prepared for the challenges of life in the twenty-first century. They must be able to do more than operate machines and manipulate data; they must be confident solvers of ever more complex social and intellectual problems. Waldorf education, known worldwide and currently one of the fastest growing private school movements in the United States, aims to create such graduates. In the process, it recognizes the importance of the whole child-mind, body, and spirit.