Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD                                          November 9, 2014

In today’s educational environment where prescriptive, accelerated curricula, standardized testing, and national standards hold sway, school children face considerable pressure to “factualize” the world and maintain a conventional standard of thought. Teachers and schools are asked whether their methods, content, and learning outcomes comply with standards. Waldorf Education asks whether national standards align with children? Taking a developmental approach to learning wherein intelligence develops in age-related stages, Waldorf Schools build a solid foundation to move children with creativity and care through the grades.

Waldorf Schools highlight the power of the cognitive imagination to get beyond artificial barriers of thought and move into different qualities of being. Play, games, art making are forms of thinking, doing, and knowing, giving rise to a poetic intelligence that is not a matter of correct answers or the proper use of language, but an act of presence and intimate knowledge of things. Walt Whitman wrote, “There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon, that / Object he became, / And that object became part of him.” By playing, making, and thinking “in” the various domains of subject matter, Waldorf children demonstrate the very capacity to learn how to learn.