I have been a teacher for many years now; and would like to use this page to link-up to many of my interests (and hopefully yours too).
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From time to time we all, including those who think seriously about education, work ourselves back to this somewhat uncomfortable question: "What are schools for?" The answer ought to be obvious, and it underlies many of our values today. But for the moment let us not take it for granted. After all, schooling for everybody is a very recent idea, born in the nineteenth century. Universal compulsory education is so completely accepted that we don't often think about schools in fresh terms. And the freshest possible approach is to ask: "What are schools for?" 

When you enter a Rudolf Steiner school, the first thing you may notice is the care given to the building. Bright colours and pictures are on the walls, and you sense that a special quality exists when you see the materials the children use in their school work. 

Another first impression may be the enthusiasm and commitment of the teachers you meet. When they take on young people, they are interested in them as individuals. These teachers are interested in the questions: How do we prepare children for today's world? How do we call forth enthusiasm for learning and work, interest and concern for their fellow human beings, a respect for the world, a healthy self-awareness? How can we help pupils find a meaning in life? Whilst forming a brief introduction to the ideas and practices at work in Rudolf Steiner schools, this section presents one answer to the opening question - and with it, something of how Rudolf Steiner schools are facing the issues of our time. 

The Rudolf Steiner Schools' approach 

Waldorf Education

The Waldorf movement recognises that schools should be truly comprehensive: open to all girls and boys aged 4 to 18 of normal capability; with a curriculum for all pupils which is as broad as time will allow; and with a healthy balance of artistic and practical, alongside academic, activities. Rudolf Steiner schools, each in its own way, set out to meet these objectives. 

Teachers in these schools are dedicated to generating a genuine inner enthusiasm for learning within every child. They achieve this in a variety of ways. Even a seemingly dry and academic subject will receive a pictorial or dynamic presentation. This method removes the pressure for competitive testing, placing and reward; motivation can arise from within. 

One of the most notable ways in which the Waldorf approach to education differs from others is in the response of the curriculum to the various phases in child development; another, related to this, is the crucial though changing relationship between teacher and child as these various phases are met. 
 

The essential phases in childhood 

The Waldorf curriculum is broad and comprehensive, and is structured to respond to and enhance the developmental phases in childhood. Rudolf Steiner drew particular attention to three essential phases, and the corresponding needs and capabilities of the child within each of them. 
 

He stressed to teachers that the only way to ensure the selection and presentation of subject matter to provide meaningful support for the child on his journey through childhood was to comprehend fully these phases. 
 

The first seven years - imitation 

Apparently helpless in his mother's arms, the infant may seem to he incapable of learning. In fact he is at his most absorptive stage. From birth he is learning to stand, to talk and to think. Uprightness, the acquisition of language and the ability to think are gigantic achievements in a period of three or four years. And they are learned without benefit of instruction! The child gains them through a combination of latent ability, instinct and above all imitation. The last is the specific talent that characterises the period up to the age of 6 or 7; the young child mimics everything in the environment uncritically - not only the sounds of speech, the gestures of people (and machines!) but the attitudes and values of parents and peers. 
 

The heart of childhood - imagination 

A transition occurs at around this age, the most prominent physical change being the loss of the milk teeth. On the one hand the child develops a new and vivid life of imagination; on the other, a readiness for more formal learning. He both expresses and experiences life through finely shaded feelings.

As he moves through these years the faculty for more consecutive thought also begins to unfold. Yet careful handling is necessary, for while this faculty needs nurturing, the ability to be fully at home in the pictorial world of imagination remains the child's most vital asset. 
 

Towards adulthood - rational judgement 

It is the third development stage - adolescence - that is crucial for the right cultivation of critical judgement. At this point, it becomes possible for the pupil to use thinking as an objective instrument. Two other features are present in the adolescent psyche: first, a healthy, valuable idealism; and, second, a vulnerable sensitivity about one's own feelings and inner experiences. These traits need protection, and many youngsters from puberty onwards are energetic in disguising their inner condition: girls may become coquettish, daring and defiant; boys defences may well take the form of sullen or introverted behaviour, apparent unwillingness to communicate or a hard shell. In any case, a barrier is erected as self-protection. The person behind the barrier is constantly seeking a model, with qualities to emulate. 
 

The pre-school child 

Learning is the key to human development, but it is not a simple, homogeneous process. What to learn, when to learn and how to learn are arrived at through a conscious and careful study of children as well as a comprehensive understanding of the human being through all stages of development. The teacher strives to help the child eventually to become a clear-thinking, sensitive and well-centred adult. To achieve this, Waldorf teachers relate to their pupils by responding to the most appropriate elements in each childhood phase. 
 

Kindergarten - a homelike environment 

The Kindergarten teacher works with the young child first by creating an environment as of a warm and loving home, rhythmically repetitive and secure. Here they respond to the developing child through two broad themes. 

First, teachers engage themselves in domestic, practical and artistic activities which the child can readily imitate (for example, baking, painting, gardening and handicrafts), colouring the work with the yearly flow of seasonal moods and festivals such as Christmas and Easter. 

Secondly, the teachers nurture the children's power of fantasy peculiar to the age in the telling of carefully selected stories, and help them to experience many aspects of life more deeply by encouraging free play. Where toys are used, they will be made of natural materials, together with cones, shells and other objects from nature that the children themselves have collected. 

In this truly natural, loving and creative environment, the children are given the scope and form which prepare them for the next phase of school life. 
 

The Lower School 

It is now appropriate to use the powers of understanding for more abstract matters, including, of course, writing, reading and arithmetic. But, to the child, it is not simply the acquisition of knowledge that is important; it is the experience of what knowledge is in life, in the hearts and minds of adults whom the child needs and wishes to recognise as authorities. 
 

The Rudolf Steiner school responds to this need by introducing the Class Teacher, the key authority, though by no means the only teacher of the class, between the 'change of teeth' and puberty, whose appointment ideally is for eight years. It is the Class Teacher's task to guide this group of children during these important and impressionable years, and to teach the class many of the curriculum subjects. 

During these years - Classes 1 to 8 - all the basic skills of literacy and numeracy are imparted, and all cultural activities which cultivate the imaginative faculties (recitation of poetry, drawing, painting, drama, music). In both the practical and cultural activities, however, the essence of the teacher's task is to work with his pupils as 'artist'. It is not that the child should simply be taught 'art', but that he should be taught so-called 'non-art' subjects imaginatively and artistically. This is true, though in widely different ways, of mathematics and grammar, carpentry and knitting, sports and foreign languages, all of which appear in the Waldorf curriculum. For example, it is more important in 'history' that the children share the anguish of Martin Luther over the decadence of the Church than that they should learn the significant dates of Luther's biography. But the latter becomes more meaningful if they have experienced the former. 

In geography, the picture of the climatic zones of Africa will be clearer to the child if the teacher can convey, artistically, descriptively, dramatically, the atmosphere of the burning dry Sahara, of the fetid clammy rain forest of the Guinea Coast, or the wet-and-dry seasonal swings of the great grasslands of the Eastern plateau. 

The teacher is appealing primarily to the feelings of the child between seven and fourteen, as the child's relationship is more likely to be shaped by the teacher's power and efforts as 'artist' than by the inherent subject matter. 
 

In the natural sciences, the sense of awe and wonder is cultivated at this age. Such a mood can arise, for example, when studying the human body, and discovering the vital relationship between the hardest of substances, bone, and the quickest of cells (produced in the bones), the red corpuscles. Or again, in examining the modes of seed production in lower and higher plants, that there is an evolutionary sequence, a connected progression. This sense of awe and wonder will develop also into a feeling of reverence that may be a firm foundation for a healthier treatment of the environment in later life. And it should underlie - yet never undermine - the critical faculties that the study of science both requires and develops in the later stages of education. 

To support such an approach, everything in a Rudolf Steiner school, from the classroom furnishings to the way a poem is recited, from the kind of pen a pupil uses to the exercises in the gymnasium, is considered with two criteria in mind: they should be functional or utilitarian, and beautiful. For the children this guarantees a caring authority that works on their own sensibilities. 
 

The Upper School 

In the Lower School, the Class Teacher does his or her work principally in the Main Lesson. This period of two hours or so beginning the day in all Rudolf Steiner schools, can be a rich experience indeed. The teacher organises the subject matter to create a balanced appeal to the pupils' intellect, feelings and will. The thinking element will arise through listening, understanding, remembering or discussing; the feeling element will be cultivated through artistic work or experience; the will element will be engaged through an activity: a set task of writing, map drawing or constructing models, for example, or through movement itself in some form. However, at this age, the Class Teacher does not yet appeal to the child's latent powers of discrimination or critical judgement. 

The 7 - 12 year old expects adults to know everything, and the young teenager still hopes for it. If these hopes and expectations of authority are satisfied during the first eight years in a Rudolf Steiner school, pupils will be able to exercise authority over themselves in adulthood all the more effectively. 
 

In the Upper School, Classes 9 to 12, a new image of the adult stands in the youngster's mind as an ideal. Thoughtful, self-possessed, considerate, strong-minded, warm- hearted. From around fourteen, the students look for such qualities in their teachers. They no longer accept their authority, but want to follow a personal leader of their own choosing. 

The Upper School Student can realise this vision of adulthood in teachers who are clearly experts through having devoted themselves to the mastery of their subject, to the logic in mathematics, to the control of hand and sharpening of eye in metal-work and wood-carving, or to the development of bodily grace, control and expression in eurythmy and gymnastics. 

Each pupil will gravitate towards chosen people and areas of activity according to taste and talents. 
 

Three fabric banners painted by a Class Twelve student in lessons studying Textiles

At the same time all should accept the disciplines of every subject, while appreciating the illumination and mutual support that an inter-disciplinary approach makes possible. 
 

Conclusion 

The Waldorf curriculum is comprehensive, covering a wide range of subject-matter, all of which is encountered by all pupils in a Rudolf Steiner school over a twelve-year period between the ages of six and eighteen. Waldorf teachers feel that the early specialisation often demanded in education of children, particularly teenagers, is a denial of the importance of the holistic treatment of the whole human being. At the same time, pupils' individual talents, in whatever field, are fully recognised, guided and encouraged.