Martin Luther King by Danica Alexander, Grade 8 Class of 2007
Imagine a school where storytelling leads students into exploration of history and geography, where geometric patterns become a basis for physical movement and handwork, where artistic impulse permeates every lesson.
This is the Eugene Waldorf School. Here we strive to meet children appropriately at each developmental stage, helping them to gain the strength to flower into free-thinking individuals. Here we recognize that children have physical, emotional, and spiritual needs and capacities as well as intellectual ones. Here we combine artistic, cognitive, and practical lessons to nurture the strengths, potential, and uniqueness of each child.
Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. —Rudolf Steiner
About Waldorf Education
Founded in Europe in 1919, Waldorf Education now includes schools on every continent and has grown to become the world's largest independent, nondenominational school system that goes through all the grades with over 900 schools worldwide.
Like the Eugene Waldorf School, every Waldorf School is independent, but each follows a core of curriculum, methods and beliefs. At the heart of this core is the belief that a fulfilled and creative life requires more than mental development or the ability to earn a living.
Every child also needs the balance provided by strong and healthy development in the life of will (the ability to get things done) and in the life of feeling (emotions, aesthetics, social sensitivity).
Waldorf education has for seventy years been putting into effect what major brain researchers and educators are discovering about the human brain/mind. — Gabriele Rico, Professor, San Jose State University
Waldorf pedagogy addresses the whole child: head, heart and hands.
Waldorf education is alternative -- not because of the subjects that are taught, but because of how and when subjects are taught. By fostering the appropriate growth of children at the appropriate times, in ways that work for them, we encourage healthy development.
According to the Waldorf model, learning begins with an encounter, which leads to experience and then a conceptual understanding. These three steps (perception, feeling and thinking) prepare the intellect of the child for abstract and conceptual learning in the adolescent.
