CP #3: Developmental Curriculum: The curriculum is created to meet and support the phase of development of the individual and the class. From birth to age 7 the guiding principle is that of imitation; from 7 to 14 the guiding principle is that of following the teacher’s guidance; during the high school years the guiding principle is idealism and the development of independent judgment.

The Preschool and Kindergarten Years

By Holly Koteen-Soulé

The curriculum of the Waldorf Preschool and Kindergarten is based on meeting the developmental needs of the child during the first seven-year cycle of life.  During this phase, the healthy growth of the physical body and the development of the child’s forces are primary and form a solid foundation for developments that will take place in the second and third seven-year cycles.  While Waldorf early childhood programs can be found in over 60 countries and inevitably reflect the culture in which they exist, in this article we will explore common elements of the curriculum rather than specific variations.

Although Rudolf Steiner died before the founding of the first Waldorf Kindergarten, he spoke about the unique qualities of the young child in many lecture cycles and offered several fundamental considerations for the education of the child from birth to seven years of age. 

Learning by Imitation 

A key statement in this Core Principle is that the young child learns by imitation.  By this we understand that young children take in the world through sensory experiences, digest and integrate those experiences, and then reproduce what they have learned in some manner.1 Imitation is also the means by which the child in the first three years (from the example of others) achieves the ability to walk, speak and begin to think. 2 

Everything in the immediate environment leaves a deep impression on young children, especially the human beings who are close to them.3 Based on this understanding, it is clear that the teachers themselves and their individual actions, words, and thoughts comprise a subtle, but important, aspect of the child’s experience and the Waldorf early childhood curriculum. (See the Fifth Core Principle for more about how early childhood teachers work consciously to be worthy of imitation.)  Waldorf early childhood educators meet the children in their care with warm-hearted empathy, are committed to self-development, and work out of a deep reverence for life. 

Life, Work and Play 

A more visible and recognizable element of the Waldorf early childhood curriculum is the focus on real, practical life, including daily, weekly, and seasonal activities.  “The whole point of preschool is to give young children the opportunity to imitate life in a simple, wholesome way… children transform adult occupations into child’s play… in children’s imitation, in all their sense-directed activities, moral and spiritual forces are working- artistic impulses that allow the child to respond in an entirely individual manner.” 4

Ideally, the early childhood classroom is less like a school and more like a busy, bustling family home, in which the purposeful work of the adults and the play of the children weave together with warmth and joy.  The teachers prepare meals, bake bread, make things for the classroom, wash, clean and mend, work in the garden, and connect with nature during outdoor excursions and in preparing for seasonal festivals. Depending on their age and abilities, children may help with the work, as well as bring it and other life experiences into their creative play.  Work and play with natural materials and open-ended toys maximize the potential for sensory enrichment, experiential learning, and individual creativity. Seasonal activities are also experienced in an artistic way at circle time with movement games, songs, and verses.

The sense of home can be present regardless of whether the group gathers in a house, a school or an outdoor shelter. Most Waldorf early childhood groups are comprised of children of mixed ages.  This augments the sense of family, allows children to learn from one another, and helps them begin to develop a feeling for others and practice simple social skills.  Social learning is not an overlay on the curriculum, but a natural, integral outcome of taking care of one’s shared space and community. 

Generally speaking, practical life activities can also support and stimulate the development of the basic senses of touch, life, movement and balance, all of which are necessary for the healthy physical development during the first seven years.5 In recent years, however, the lack of sufficient movement in our modern lifestyle requires that early childhood teachers work more consciously to make sure that children’s needs for sensory development and integration are being met. Teachers may address these needs by bringing specific movements at circle time and by spending more time outside in nature.

The Benefits of Rhythm

So far we have explored two aspects that teachers consider in building their curriculum.  First, everything in the environment, including the adults, should be worthy of imitation, and secondly, the activities of the classroom should be fully embedded in the practical life.  Working out of both of these principles invites and welcomes the child to connect to their physical being and to the joy of life.  A third important consideration has to do with providing support for the young child’s learning to breathe. 6 In this case, “breathing” does not only refer to physical breathing.  It also refers to bringing into balance or harmonizing opposing polarities, as in expanding and contracting or taking in and giving out.  In this sense “breathing” is an important aspect of feeling at home in one’s physical body and also relating to others and one’s surroundings.

During the course of a day in a Waldorf early childhood classroom, there is a rhythmic alternation of child-initiated play and teacher-guided artistic activities, of expansive activity and focused activity, of vigorous movement and quiet rest, of speaking and listening, of verses and song, outdoor and indoor time, group activity and individual activity – all examples of moving between polarities.  Taken from the perspective of the child, there is a sense of moving back and forth between a feeling of breathing out and a feeling of breathing in.  The predictability of the daily rhythm provides security for the child. Over time, trust in the harmonizing flow between opposites creates a safe, bounded space where individuals and the group can feel free to engage in self-directed creative activity. 

While life activities are the basis for the curriculum, self-initiated creative play is the heart of any Waldorf early childhood program.  Successful creative play means that the children are transforming what they are experiencing of the world by their own will activity.  In the process they are mastering their own will forces, so that those forces can support the development of their future feeling and thinking capacities.

 Establishing Healthy Habits

The nature of the will forces in the young child and their development during the first seven years is a further aspect to consider in understanding the intentions of the Waldorf early childhood curriculum. Besides the already mentioned benefits of working rhythmically, a program based on regularly repeated activities organically guides the child’s strong will impulses into healthy, useful habits.

 The will of the child is the strongest during the first seven years.  Between birth and approximately 2 1/3, the will is necessarily connected to the child’s bodily instincts and impulses and is the quintessential willing will.  Over the course of learning to walk and speak and beginning to think, (between 2 1/3 and 4 2/3) the child is more open to others and the will has more of a desire character.  This is sometimes called the feeling will.  Between 4 2/3 and 7 years of age, when the child becomes more interested in the world, their will develops more of a motive character. This is sometimes called the thinking will. 7 

With the youngest children, working rhythmically supports the child’s development of healthy physical habits, in the areas of eating, dressing, and self-care.  Between three and five years of age, clear, consistent rhythms and expectations can also support the development of healthy social habits, such as taking turns, sharing resources and negotiating with others. With the older child in the kindergarten, habits arising from the opportunity to participate in purposeful work can be useful for one’s life in many ways, including supporting future academic activities. All of these habits, of course, arise out of imitation and are strengthened by repetition and the teacher’s rhythmic ordering of space and time.

This shift in the quality of the will and the child’s maturing physical capacities account for the different emphases that can be found in programs designed for children of a specific age range. Early childhood teachers often choose to bring in particular activities for the first-grade-ready children, as they near the end of their last year in kindergarten, in order to meet their burgeoning capacities and interests.

An Experiential Foundation for Numeracy and Literacy

A final common element of the Waldorf early childhood curriculum is the conscious awareness of helping the children build an experiential foundation for numeracy and literacy.  Mathematical concepts are grasped organically in the course of everyday life activities, like setting the table for snack and having to share or adding to limited resources for creative play.  The telling of stories, fairy tales and puppetry build an artistic foundation for language development and literacy.  This special aspect of the Waldorf early childhood curriculum also nourishes the still nascent soul life of the young child with dream-like pictures from the rich heritage of many world cultures.  

References

1 Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child, p. 24

2 Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness, Ch. 2-3

3 Rudolf Steiner, Human Values in Education, p. 54-55

4 Ibid., p. 72

5 Edmund Schoorel, The First Seven Years, Ch. 4

6 Rudolf Steiner, Study of Man, p. 20-22

7 Renate Long-Breipohl, Under the Stars, Ch.3

The Grade School Years

By James Pewtherer

As a child steps across the threshold from the nurturing routines of an early childhood space into the world of school, something new is now possible. It is at this time that the growth forces which had formed the young child are freed in some degree for use in a new way. At around age seven, those forces have completed a crucial phase of building the child’s physical body and its organs. It is a foundational principle of child development and anthroposophically-informed education that these forces should not be called on prematurely for intellectual pursuits before this cycle of growth is complete. The aim is to ensure that a strong, healthy physical body will be there as a foundation for the child’s entire life before these growth forces begin to be redirected in service of focused, cognitive activity. 

Working with these freed-up forces, the class teacher now gradually weans the child from much of the imitative learning that characterizes early childhood education. In its place, the child delves into the world of images, where the imagination leads over into understanding. The children hear a beautifully told story or see a chalk drawing on the board and while absorbed as they take in these things, they begin to be more reflective about these inner and outer pictures, comparing their experiences in discussions about what they have heard or seen. They still should love what they see, but now they do so with more distance than did the kindergarten child. At this age, the child can begin to put those pictures into a context, or what we can call a growing “understanding.” This understanding, however, is more than abstract intellectual knowledge. Instead, it is understanding saturated with rich feelings that run the gamut from excitement to sadness to joy. In this way, the learning during the years of the elementary school should never become dried out and dead. The gradual separation of “self” from “world” in these early elementary school years must not make the child feel isolated from the world. Instead, at the end of a lesson, the child should be left with the enthusiastic feeling, “That was so interesting and exciting! I want to learn more!” 

An overarching principle that is developmentally appropriate in a child’s education during this second seven-year period includes the love of one’s teacher, the love of learning, and the recognition of the beauty to be found in the world. It is up to the teacher to provide the example as artist, scientist, and beloved guide. These qualities in the teacher cultivate in the child a feeling life that in turn develops a trust in his or her own heart-borne judgment. This is one of the imponderables that grows imperceptibly during these elementary years. It leads the child to know that his/her own heart increasingly is able to be a true guide as to the right way to act in a given situation. This is a matter of cultivating authentic sensibilities; feelings that will help children develop a moral compass rather than any maudlin sentimentality. It is the teacher who guides this development through his or her relationship to and love for the individual child and the class as a whole, ideally over a span of eight school years. 

During the initial phase of this seven-year period, for instance in the first grade, the teacher may tell a story of four animals who decide to unite in seeking a new life for themselves in the town of Bremen. The child can see that each animal has its one-sidedness, in that the donkey is good at one thing and the cat at something else. But when the animals join forces, the child sees how their collaboration leads them to succeed where they would have failed on their own. 

Once the story has been told, and the children have been able to sleep on it, they re-create it by retelling it out of their own internal, imaginative pictures. Then, in a completely non-didactic way, a conversation ensues based on their simple observations about how one of the characters acted or the way events unfolded. Inherent in such a story is also a living picture of how the human being combines many of these traits to become truly human. Yet such a concept would not be spoken. Rather it would stand there, ready for the children to draw upon it then or at some later time in the years to come. They gain a feeling for the “rightness” of such a reality.

The middle years of the elementary school time provide still more illustrations of this developmental approach. One of these arises in arithmetic when working with common fractions. By their very nature, numbers are abstractions in that they take the child from a consideration of objects (e.g., apples) to “counters” that stand for the objects (e.g., fingers, strokes on a page, etc.) and finally to symbols (4 or 57 or 2398). Imagine, then: How does a ten-year-old in fourth grade make sense of a fractional (broken) number which has a 3 over a 4 (3/4) or a 5 over a 16 (5/16)? 

And then how does the child make sense of the concept that the “4,” in the first example, is a bigger number than the “16” in the second one? 

Here the sure-handed teacher leads the children through all sorts of cutting-out exercises and practices, using regular paper shapes or blocks of wood or slices of pizza. We take them apart and put them together; we try to combine equal and then different “sizes” (denominators) and different quantities (“numerators”) of the fractions (3 fourths and 1 fourth; then 3 eighths and 5 eighths; then 1 fourth and 1 eighth, etc.). Stories are invented to illustrate the use of these pieces in addition to games that require putting together or taking apart these pieces to make mixed numbers and/or find common denominators. Only then can the abstraction of number have a sufficient foundation in experience to allow the child to feel comfort and success in working with these abstractions and in further computations with them. 

Here it is important to note the shift in consciousness which most children experience at the age of about nine. For at the time of this oft-called “nine-year change” in third or fourth grade, the child necessarily finds that the unity of their world, which was a given up until then, is gradually lost. (This is one of the reasons that introducing fractions – “broken numbers” – is so apt at this age.) While this loss of childhood wholeness is a kind of crisis for a child, it is an important step towards freedom in his/her development. The children become aware of differences among themselves, of the fallibility of parents and teachers, and of the hard work needed to achieve the results they want in their own work. At the same time, a feeling of vulnerability and insecurity comes over the child, leading to critical comments about adults and other children, attempts to prove his/her competence or superiority, and a wish to be reassured that they are loved and valued. 

So it is critical that the sure hand of the wise teacher guides the child through this crisis. It is the inspired teacher who must decide what to bring to the class at every given moment and how best to bring it. The genius of the education can meet the needs of the children at this age in a number of ways. At this age, these include: curricula which give an imaginative picture of the pathway to becoming true human beings (e.g., in Old Testament stories); practical studies which teach them that human efforts, that is, their efforts, can provide food, clothing and shelter for people; they can predictably and consistently know some aspects of the world around them through using weight and measure to gauge their surroundings; they can learn the satisfaction of repeatedly overcoming their own imperfections through hard work and patience in order to create things of beauty. Not of least importance is also the loving but firm expectations of the teacher who requires of each child that he/she lives up to the truly human standards of care, politeness, kindness and fair play in how the child meets others and meets the world. 

Towards the end of the elementary years, in another example, the subject of modern history provides the teacher with yet another opportunity to give the children a chance to experience themselves as stepping into the stream of human society. Biographies of larger-than-life personalities such as Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King can be joined by those of little-known heroes such as “Wild Bill Cody” (who survived the Nazi concentration camps) or the Japanese engineer who in 2013 led his workers out of the black horror and sure death of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant. Inventors, natural scientists, astronomers—individuals in virtually every walk of life—can provide examples of what it means to learn about oneself and the world so as to rise to one’s true humanity. 

In these upper-elementary history classes, the students widen their focus from their own (often egotistical) concerns at this age to also see their place in the world. The teacher uses the subject matter to awaken them to humanity’s charge to become part of the solution to what ails us in society today. They have experienced the range of gifts and challenges embodied in their long-time classmates as well as in their own communities at home. Out of this, they are coming to feel their individual responsibility to take initiative and help others in their community. They also come to see their enhanced effectiveness when working together with others and in a healthy group of peers. 

These elementary years embrace another stage of development, the so-called “12-year change,” which takes place toward later elementary school years. At this time, the physical body begins to change outwardly with its longer limbs and development of secondary sexual characteristics. The bony structure becomes more predominant, the voices of the boys drop, breasts in the girls develop and the sense of having a private, inner life grows stronger in both genders. Here it is important to pull their singular focus away from their own naturally egotistical concerns and have them learn about the myriad matters of interest and need in the world around them. 

The aim is to teach them so that these older children are moved to want to do something out of their own initiative, even if they haven’t yet developed the analytical ability to stand back, see, and then understand what is called for out of a wider context. That ability and awareness will develop in the high school years. Here, the task of the class and subject teachers is to keep them inspired and working to develop their own knowledge of self and world. The point is that they come to feel more inspired to want to learn and to work for positive change in themselves and the world. The curriculum as well as the love and respect of the children for their teachers provide the means to educate the growing human being at this stage of development. 

By the end of the elementary school years, the class teacher has helped them to develop a healthy relationship to self-knowledge and knowledge of the world around them. Now, as the class teacher steps back, a circle of high school teachers takes up the care of the young person as the individual personality emerges further. The knowledge which was brought through image and feeling life is now enhanced by a schooling of the emergent ability to think in the next stage of development in the high school years.

The High School Years

Douglas Gerwin

Some say the world will end in fire, 

Some say in ice. 

– Robert Frost 

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.” 

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. 

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. 

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 back 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 part-time jobs, and what used to be the most exciting and sometimes premature token of maturity—the driver’s license.  

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.

Endnotes 

1. Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice” in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p.268.
2. Rudolf Steiner, “Education for Adolescents” (21 June 1922), reprinted in Genesis of a Waldorf High School: A Source Book, ed. Douglas Gerwin, 3rd edition (Fair Oaks, CA: AWSNA  Publications, 2001), pp. 3–6. This lecture should not be confused with the lecture cycle which Rudolf Steiner gave to the Waldorf teachers a year earlier and which was initially known as “The Supplementary Course” (because it followed up on the lecture course entitled Study of Man) and which has since been published under various titles including Education for Adolescents (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1996).
3. Robert Frost, Complete Poems, p.268 
4.   Ibid.
5.   Whereas the receipt of the first driver’s license used to be perhaps the most important rite of passage for the adolescent, nowadays in the age of Internet and virtual friendships, somewhere between a quarter and a third of eligible teenagers are foregoing the option of getting their driver’s permit. Instead, they rely on their parents—or on rides arranged via social media—to get around.