waldorf education
Waldorf education is a humanistic pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The Waldorf approach emphasizes the role of the imagination, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The overarching goals of this educational approach are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, moral and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.
In 1919, Rudolf Steiner visited the Waldorf-Astonia cigarette factory to give a speech to the workers there to promote the need of a new social order, a new sense of ethics, and a less damaging way of resolving conflict. The factory owner then asked Steiner if he would be interested in starting a school for the workers children; to which he agreed. Steiner’s response was: “The need for imagination, a sense of truth and a feeling of responsibility – these are the three forces which are the very nerve of education”. Steiner also believed that a person had twelve senses: the five senses plus language, warmth, balance, movement, life, and individuality of the other [14]. With these notions and ideas in mind, Steiner began his Waldorf education which began operating in 1928 and has become one of the fastest growing independent schools today. As of 2010 there were 995 independent Waldorf schools located in sixty countries throughout the world; as of 2001 there were 1400 kindergartens and 120 institutions for special education world-wide. There are also Waldorf-based public and charter schools, homeschooling environments, and Waldorf ideas are increasingly being taken up, often less in whole than in part, by other public and private schools.
The educational approach is known in some countries as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education