Waldorf Schools Curriculum

The Waldorf Schools curriculum is inspired by spiritual and moral discourses and is experienced as a union of sensory life and inner experience: a spiritual science approach. The Waldorf curriculum was developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861 1925), an Austrian scientist, philosopher, artist, social reformer, and educator, and was implemented at the Free Waldorf School (Die Freie Waldorfschule) for Boys and Girls, founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, had invited Steiner to develop a school for his employees' children to educate in ways that might preclude catastrophes such as war. Thus, the impulse behind Waldorf education was and remains cultural and social renewal.

According to Steiner, instilling knowledge as abstract and separate from the whole dehumanizes society, and this knowledge, disconnected from values and feelings, is coldly destructive. Rather, a holistic and balanced development of intuitive, imaginative, and inspirational capacitiesfully integrating knowledge, values, and feelings would prepare children to contribute to social well-being and renewal. Steiner claimed that in educating the whole being, children would grow inwardly free, thus capable of resisting dogmatic and harmful ideologies.

This claim conflicts with a controversial aspect of Waldorf curriculum and the anthroposophical philosophy that undergirds it. Although the curriculum and philosophy were so abhorrent to the National Socialist ideology that the Nazis banned the Anthroposophical Society in 1935 and forbade Waldorf schools to take on new students, current critics of Steiner's work claim an underlying racist/cultural hierarchical doctrine. Other critics object to Waldorf schools and anthroposophy as promoting occult beliefs. Both of these criticisms have been strongly refuted by the Association of Waldorf Schools.

However, a sense of helplessness in the face of cultural, economic, and political upheaval, similar to what Molt experienced in post-World War I Germany, has led many parents and teachers of today to seek a means of educating children toward social and cultural renewal. Frustrated by the government's role in educationusing funding and testing mandates to coerce teachers and children into narrow and joyless experiences with the disciplines of knowledgethese educators and families note that the Waldorf curriculum reflects a different kind of consciousness. Steiner's articulation of spiritual science (geisteswissenchschaft: wissenchschaft knowledge and geist-spirit) is a way of seeing the world. And so, the work is based on not only what is seen but how it is seenusing a way of looking that combines “insideness” and “outsideness” for seeing the spirit in physical matter.

Waldorf teachers study anthroposophy, a view of the human being that guides them to teach with attentiveness and care, cultivating respect for the individuality of a child and the phases of childhood. Characterized by calm, patience, creativity, rhythms, and aesthetics, the Waldorf curriculum is [Page 938]purposely designed in a holistic approach to teaching and learning with elements of science, the arts, religion, and human values working in concert to create wholesome work with storytelling a keystone in developing the child's sense of order, cultivating self-discipline, and enjoying being one with the world. Social consciousness underlies the integrated curriculum of science, math, and social sciences as children learn to take part in the world.

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