Waldorf Pedagogy is an educational proposal that Rudolf Steiner presented as a response to the need for a school of the future, felt by the workers of the Waldorf cigarette factory, to whom he had given a series of lectures on social and educational issues at the request of the factory’s director, Emil Molt. This followed a social movement for citizenship, where Steiner presented his theory on social bodies – the social tripartition – in Würtenberg, at a time when Europe was experiencing the aftermath of the First World War, around 1920.
Steiner’s pedagogical proposal should be understood as a path of moral edification that, while responding to the needs of individual development and, at the same time, the desirable evolution of humanity at the current moment in its history, helps human beings to consciously contribute to this evolution through the realization of their own life project.
Waldorf Pedagogy is not a teaching system, but an art - the art of awakening what is truly within each human being.
So the curriculum is designed to cater for physical/vital, soul, conceptual and spiritual development, aimed at the future man who is morally free, i.e. capable of acting on the imperative of conscience in the name of Good and Truth.
Fulfilling the curriculum in Waldorf Pedagogy means adapting the teaching-learning process to the characteristics of each student, while at the same time serving the age group of the group. School knowledge only becomes meaningful in the evolving context of each child, in a dynamic of self-help and inter-help that resolves difficulties and reveals solutions that value the role of the other(s) in each person’s life. But this is only possible when the class teacher foresees the effects that the method they intend to use will have on their students’ growth. Because, let’s not forget, your main task is to get to know who the child is and, consequently, what they need.
That’s why Steiner said that educating is an art, because just like the artist who, looking at marble, glimpses the form that he will release from it, the teacher must, looking at the child, be able to see the man in becoming who inhabits it, because it is this man that the curriculum, in its way of working, will serve.
The Waldorf school takes the human being along this path, allowing the child to marvel at the physical and human world and later serve them with reverence and love.
Throughout the school years, but especially until adolescence, the emphasis is on experiencing things and knowledge in direct contact with life and its manifestations, which leads children to involve their whole being in understanding the world around them, rooting in them a bond of respect and love for life. On this foundation, you will become a citizen who truly cares for the Earth.
Steiner stated, as has been shown today in the neurological research of Antonio Damasio, that what teaches us and transmits knowledge is cognitive feeling and not cold, distant rationality. It is a learning process that is developed at school through teaching that focuses on the relationship between man and the world, from which will later emanate man’s sense of responsibility towards the world he inhabits.
The concepts acquired in this way will not dry up over the course of a lifetime as something finished and dead, but, like an organic form, will grow with the wealth of learning that each person makes along the way. In fact, only living concepts allow human beings to seek answers to the questions they encounter.
What distinguishes Waldorf pedagogy from other pedagogies is its formative rather than informative character and its profound vision of human nature, whose essence, being spiritual, can only be served by a search for meaning that transcends the immediate, the perishable, the finite, typical of sensory reality. However, it is by immersing yourself in this reality that you can grasp using all your senses, that human beings can learn throughout their lives to transcend it in order to rediscover behind it the meaning of life and of their existence as a free man.
