In a lecture entitled “Education for Adolescents,” Rudolf Steiner describes how, from puberty onwards, “latent questions” begin rising in the minds of young adults concerning all aspects of life in the world. Steiner says that the teacher must help adolescents articulate these questions—without, however, falling into the trap of answering them—“so that riddles arise in their youthful souls.”(2)

If riddles do not come to consciousness in the growing teenager, then the soul forces that would normally give rise to these life questions run the risk of being diverted in two directions: toward a lust for the erotic or toward a lust for power. In other words, with puberty a creative urge awakens in teenagers that can realize itself in both senses of the verb “to conceive”—that is, in the capacity to give birth to abstract ideas as well as the capacity to create new human life. Starting with this age, we are able to conceive our own thoughts no less than our own offspring. If these burgeoning powers of abstract thinking—a thinking saturated, to be sure, with deep feeling and yearning for ideals—are thwarted, then they may be redirected to one or the other form of lust.

Though they share a common origin, the lust for the erotic and the lust for power manifest themselves in the human soul as opposites. The lust for the erotic may be felt as erupting out of deep and mysterious depths, like a volcano overwhelming the conscious mind with feelings that carry the searing heat of desire:

From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. (3)

By contrast, the lust for power may be felt as a powerful intellectual force of cognition descending as though from above, taking hold of our will with an icy, calculating intention born of cold hatred.

But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. (4)

Generalizations are risky, but boys are probably more likely to divert this creative intellectual energy into a pursuit of the physical eroticism, girls into the pursuit of psychological power. You will more often discover pornographic magazines hidden beneath the beds of the boys, for example, than of the girls, and the legion of X-rated sites on the internet is far more geared to lure male than female visitors. On the other side of the sexual divide, the sometimes catty and even cruel behavior more typical of young adolescent girls may be understood as an expression of a lust for power.

It is important, though, to remember that both erotic and power lusts originate in the same capacity of soul—namely, in the capacity to conceive. In this context, one may ask how this capacity can be exercised without being prematurely drawn into physical expression or behavioral perversion.

Here Rudolf Steiner points to the redemptive value of beauty for engaging the erotic sense before it is diverted into the sensual and to the value of deeds of altruism in harnessing the lust for power before it is turned to selfish purpose. Ultimately, lusts of any kind stimulate a craving that can never be satisfied. In contrast, experiences of beauty and altruism yield nourishment that is deeply and lastingly satisfying.

For insight into the more general latent questions that live just below adolescent consciousness, we may turn to the Waldorf high school curriculum and the riddles it can inspire. In their specifics, these questions will take on an individual character in the mind and heart of each teenager who poses them. But in general it is perhaps possible to identify four simple yet archetypal questions that are bound to arise, and which the Waldorf high school curriculum is designed to address at each level of a student’s four-year high school career.

Each year of the Waldorf high school curriculum embodies, in broad strokes, an underlying question or theme that helps guide students, not just through their studies of outer phenomena, but through their inner growth as well. These themes and methods are adapted to each specific group of students and take account of the fact that teenagers mature at varying paces—hence the “broad strokes.” And yet, one can identify struggles common to most any teenager. Even though adolescents pass through developmental landscapes at varying speeds, they all nonetheless will cover similar terrain.

Grade Nine
As freshmen plunge into the high school, they are also plunging with new intensity into the materiality of their bodies— with the unfolding of puberty—and into the immateriality of abstract thinking. There is tension in this opposition, often struggle, and occasionally even revolt.

The ninth grade curriculum is designed with these tremendous developmental changes and struggles in mind. It allows the students to see their inner experiences reflected to them in outer phenomena. In physics, for instance, students study in thermodynamics the opposition of heat and cold; in chemistry, the expansion and contraction of gases; in history, the conflicts and the resulting revolutions in the United States, France, Russia, China, and Iran; and in geology, the collision of plate tectonics.

Through the chaos and tension of these struggles, students are summoned to exercise powers of exact observation: in the sciences, to describe and draw precisely what happened in the lab experiments and demonstrations (without adding, from the outset, an overlay of theoretical explanation); in the humanities, to recount clearly a sequence of events or to describe the nature of a character without getting lost in a plethora of details. The objective here is to train in the students powers of exact observation and reflection so that they can experience in the raging storm of phenomena around them the steady ballast of their own thinking. Strong powers of wakeful perception form the basis for later years of study, well beyond high school.

One may summarize the content and approach of this freshman curriculum with the underlying question: What? What happened? What’s going on here? What did you see and hear?

Grade Ten
Emerging from the turmoil of grade nine, the tenth grader may begin to discover a certain balance point between the violent collision of opposites. Physically, the boys may achieve a steadier gait as their legs thicken and catch up with their oversized feet, while the girls may appear more poised and upright. Mentally, the sophomores may begin to bring a certain order to the confusion of their thoughts, a calming mid-point to the turbulence of opposites.

The curriculum responds to this search with subjects that incorporate the comparison and balancing of contrasting opposites: in chemistry, the study of acids and bases; in physics, the principles of mechanics; in earth sciences, the self-regulating processes of weather patterns; in astronomy, the co-equality of centripetal and centrifugal forces; in embryology, the play of masculine and feminine influences.

Through the study of balance in natural and human phenomena, students can begin to find their own fulcrum. In so doing, they are called to exercise powers of comparison and contrast, weighing in the balance contrary phenomena to determine their value and significance, as well as their origin.

Students may discover that in this balancing of opposites, new forms can arise—in clouds and tides, or in planets and solar systems, or in male and female sexuality. This discovery may in turn prompt the desire to explore the origins of things, to find the source of these forms in the beginnings of the universe or of history or of human language. In other words, the study of ancient times can now be taken up at a deeper level.

One may summarize the themes of this grade with the underlying question: How? How does this relate to that? How do these contrasting phenomena interrelate? And how did they come about?

Grade Eleven
As adolescents enter the second half of their high school career, generalizations about their development become increasingly difficult. The strokes must grow ever broader. “Sweet sixteen” and beyond, however, is a typical time of newfound depths to the inner life of thoughts, feelings, and deeds. Deeper— and more individualized—latent questions may begin to burn. This may be the year in which students feel the urge to change schools or even to drop out of school altogether. In these inner promptings, a new and urgent voice speaks: “Leave behind what you have been given and get on with your own journey!” Inner yearnings for intellectual independence and freedom from parental or environmental constraints may drive teenagers of this age into avenues of private pursuit and personal interests very different from what up until now has occupied them. Outer statements of growing independence (already visible in earlier years) may also abound—in dress, hairstyles, the pursuit of parttime jobs, and what used to be the most exciting and sometimes premature token of maturity—the driver’s license. (5) 

The curriculum for the junior year allows students to cut free to a greater degree from their peers and set off on their own uncharted course into the invisible recesses of life within. The junior year curriculum could be characterized by the theme of “invisibility”: namely, by the study of those subjects that draw the student into areas not accessible to the experience of our senses. Such a journey requires a new type of thinking—thinking no longer anchored in what our senses give us—as well as a feeling of confidence that this type of thinking will not lead us astray.

In literature, for instance, this journey to an invisible source is captured in main lesson blocks such as the Grail legends or Dante’s Divine Comedy. Other subjects, however, call upon similar powers. In chemistry, the students enter the invisible kingdom of the atom (invisible because, by definition, one cannot “see” atoms). In physics, they explore the invisible world of electricity (which we can perceive only in its effects, not in its inherent nature). In history, they relive Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment eras in which men and women set off on individual quests and journeys to destinations unknown (and, in some cases, unknowable). In projective geometry, we follow parallel lines to the point they share in the infinite—a point that can be thought even though it cannot be pictured.

In short, like the horizon that beckoned to Renaissance explorers like Magellan, calling them to venture beyond its visible edge, the dimensions of the classroom during the junior year are vastly enlarged to embrace the furthest reaches of the student’s own imagination and interests. In many aspects of the curriculum, the student is launched into more ambitious, individual projects, and research assignments.

These voyages to the invisible landscapes pose an underlying question intended to strengthen the student’s powers of independent analysis and abstract theorizing. The question is: Why? Why are things this way? Why did the events of history take this or that course? And even deeper “why” questions— Why am I here?, questions of destiny, life’s meaning, social responsibility—may find their way into the classroom at this age.

Grade Twelve
The twelve years of Waldorf education can be compared to a giant cylindrical tower set in a vast expanse of landscape. One can imagine children entering at the ground level of this tower in first grade and beginning to climb an interior spiral staircase of eleven turns. At each level (or floor) of the tower, they can look out through a window that gives a partial perspective of the surrounding landscape. Some curricular “windows” are set above one another, at different levels of the spiral staircase. For example, the “windows” for grade eight and grade nine look out at the same landscape but from different heights.

Approaching the twelfth grade level, the seniors push open a trap door in the roof of the tower and step out onto an open terrace. Now, for the first time, they can survey the full panorama of the landscape that they previously glimpsed on the way up through eleven preceding perspectives. In other words, the senior year is intended to be the gradual synthesis of the education— the great stock-taking and preparation for the next stage in learning—and also, the fully conscious placement of oneself in the center of this panorama.

“Point” and “periphery” are the complementary perspectives for this year. The senior curriculum serves both by offering subjects that synthesize many themes—world history, architecture, Faust—and relate these themes to the centrality of the human being, as well as to current times. To the same end, the students study the relationship of the human being to the varied animal kingdoms (zoology). They read the Transcendentalists, Russian novelists, such as Dostoyevski, and other great thinkers and writers who have wrestled with modern questions of our place in today’s world.

Assignments increasingly call upon the students to integrate what they have studied, to synthesize disparate disciplines in an attempt to address the underlying question of the senior curriculum: Who? Who is this being that is called Human? And ultimately—Who stands behind the outer play of events and natural phenomena, integrating them in a synthesizing whole?

In this sense, the curriculum of the twelfth grade not only recapitulates the themes of the four years of high school, but also returns to the place where the Waldorf curriculum began in grade one—with the image of the whole. Now, however, the difference, one hopes, is that the student will truly “know the place for the first time.”

In summary:

Grade nine, by training powers of observation, speaks to the underlying question: What?
Grade ten, by training powers of comparison, speaks to the underlying question: How?
Grade eleven, by training powers of analysis, speaks to the underlying question: Why?
Grade twelve, by training powers of synthesis, speaks to the underlying question: Who?

By means of these broad and archetypal questions, high school students are invited to explore the fathomless riddles of their surroundings and of their own existence, starting in the breadth of the outer world—the world of “What Is”—and culminating in the depths of the inner world—the world of “Who Is.” Ultimately it is these questions that will guide them in the pursuit of their creative conceptions, both intellectual and sexual.