Guiding Young Minds: A developmental picture of the Waldorf approach to freedom in thinking

“Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings, who are able of themselves, to impart purpose and direction to their life.” Rudolf Steiner
We generally think of freedom as freedom to think for oneself, to summon initiative, and to make decisions independently. One of the ways that Waldorf education approaches this desirable outcome is by examining the connection between freedom and teaching mobile concepts, or by characterizing rather than defining, which are foundational principles in the elementary school years.
What advocates of freedom presumably most want to keep free is the mind, yet it is the mind that mainstream education often works most purposefully to fill. One way of looking at this is to say that knowledge presented in the wrong way at the wrong time is a kind of mis-education or even indoctrination. Steiner portrays this by writing that when a child is given “dry, abstract, prosaic ideas instead of living pictures that engage the activities of his whole being”, then we have something that is metaphorically likened to a child eating a fish by “carefully cutting away the flesh and consuming the bones….Nothing is more hurtful to the child than definitions and sharply contoured ideas, for these have no quality of growth.  Now the human being must grow as his organism grows.  The child must be given mobile concepts—–concepts whose form is constantly changing as he becomes more mature.”
I once had a child in my kindergarten class who had watched a National Geographic Special about the sun. He told me the sun is a big ball of fire and if you got too close to it, it would zapp, burn  you right up.  I saw that he was really afraid. I told him that father sun is very wise.  He knows how to stay just the right distance away to give us light and warmth and would never hurt us.
What does it look like to characterize rather than define? The kindergarten child knows the sun through verse and blessings—-“earth who gives to us this food, sun who makes it ripe and good, dear earth, dear sun, by you we live, our loving thanks to you we give.”  Here the sun is portrayed in a spirit of gratitude which resonates deeply with kindergarten children.
In the early grades, children encounter the sun in nature stories such as the story of how the wind and the sun had a competition to see who could make the traveler take off his coat first.  Children at this age still feel a magical oneness with nature. They feel they can converse with plants and animals as naturally as with people.
In fifth grade, children may study the mythology of ancient Persia where the Sun God, Ahura Mazda, is central to the whole of the cultural life. In 7th grade the sun is studied in an astronomy main lesson. Again, with the sun as an example, the children may draw a concentric circle map of a geocentric view of the planets in contrast to a heliocentric view.  As children move through the grades, the faculty for more logical and sequential thought unfolds. But even in the middle school years, keeping the pictorial world of imagination alive is vitally important.
Through such an approach, a rich context and a strong feeling connection for the various subjects taught through the grades lays a firm foundation on which a more rigorous approach is taken in High School.   As Steiner explains:
“….then at puberty these inner riches can be transmuted into intellectual activity. He will now be faced with the task of thinking what before he willed and felt.  And we must take the greatest care that his intellectual thinking does not appear too early.  For a human being can only come to an experience of freedom if his intellectuality awakens within him of itself, not if it has been poured into him by his teacher.  But it must not awaken in poverty of soul.”
By Gesine Abraham 2025

Smartphone Use

Johnathan Haidt, the author of the book “The Anxious Generation” was recently interviewed on NPR.

Below are some highlights:

“Smartphones are not only addictive, but they contribute to low self-esteem and feelings of isolation among kids. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says it’s not too late to undo some of the damage if parents walk back what they allow their kids to access on their phones and delay when they give them smartphones. He lays out how in his new book, “The Anxious Generation: How The Great Rewiring Of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic Of Mental Illness.”

The interviewer, Steve Inskeep, asks if online gaming could be a substitute for the face-to-face, old school play Haidt recommends.

HAIDT: Oh, I’m sure someone would contend it. Many people have contended it. You know, my son plays Fortnite, and I can see it’s really fun. He’s laughing his head off with his friends. But here’s the thing. These platforms give boys what they want, but in a way that actually isn’t as satisfying as if they were actually doing physical sports and, you know, having conflicts with a group of other boys that were real. So, yeah, sure. You know, it’s fun, and they’re interacting with other boys. But what happens to their mental state? They get really lonely. They start agreeing with statements on surveys – I often feel lonely.

And it’s a similar story for the girls. Girls are lured on by the promise of talking to everybody, finding out what everyone’s doing, gossiping about people. You can get instant updates on everyone. And so you’d think that this is like girls’ heaven. But actually, this is girls’ hell – everyone talking about everyone, able to shame or attack anyone anonymously, even on weekends. You can never escape. What happened when girls moved their social lives onto social media platforms was the same as for boys on video platforms. They get really anxious, lonely and depressed.

After conversing about possible avenues of smartphone regulation Inskeep asks: If you make it harder for them to access a few sites, they’re still going to have the phone in their hands. They still might spend hours on it.

HAIDT: What I’m saying is that we are now stuck in a set of collective action problems, and the kids have to be on all the time because all the other kids are on all the time. So I’m suggesting four norms that we can adopt even if Congress never comes to our help. No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone. No social media till 16. Just don’t let your kids open accounts, and you check the apps on their phone. Phone-free schools and far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.

So what I’m saying is just delay, delay, delay. Delay the age at which the kids are going to jump into this cesspool. Clear this all out of middle school, then we’ll work on high school. But let’s start by getting it out of elementary and middle school.”

INSKEEP: And do you think that those steps, if widely practiced by large numbers of families, would make a meaningful difference?

HAIDT: Oh, my God. If we could get half or more of the families to adopt these four norms, we would see a drop in rates of anxiety and depression within a year. And I can say this because whenever a school has done one of these, they get results. And then – and here’s the key – you can’t just take away the screens and say, oh, no, kids, you know, screens are bad for you; you know, you have to wait. You have to give them back what they most need and want, which is each other.

Here’s the link to the entire interview for those who may be interested: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/27/1241116105/the-consequences-of-a-smartphone-centered-childhood

Childlike Wonder as the Suitable Mood of the Teacher

I was going through some old files recently and came across the quote below by Dr Richard Beck. I’m not sure where it is from, but at some point I had written it down. Dr Beck writes about the struggle to regain contact with wonder, surprise and awe. His words caught my attention because these are the very qualities that Waldorf education fosters.  In his words:
“Life in the ‘real world’ is often burdened by boredom and weariness. We move numbly from workday to workday, entertainment to entertainment, screen to screen. Worst of all, our relationships become affected by a ‘taken for granted feeling.’ We confess the tragedy of this, the monotony we feel with others, even with those we love most dearly. But we struggle to regain contact with wonder, surprise and awe.\
Enchantment isn’t pretending a fanciful feeling or escaping the world. Enchantment is rediscovering the world. Enchantment is looking at green again and being startled anew, seeing the world shine again like transformation.
Enchantment is fundamentally about perception….it isn’t concerned with a scientific description of the world but with beholding the sacred meaning of the world. Enchantment is the daily work of cleaning the dirty window of our perception so that the familiar surprises us again with joy, wonder, and gratitude.  We crave this sacramental experience of the world, where common and ordinary things become symbols and signposts, inbreaking of the divine, and gateways to heaven.”
As a Waldorf kindergarten teacher, I’ve long been concerned about how modern trends in education are systematically taking the enchantment out of “mainstream” preschool and kindergarten education. The intellectualizing capacity is so strong that we see the young child’s fanciful consciousness as an error to be corrected, or at the very least, hurried out of. Pretend play, which is the very heart of early childhood, has been eliminated for the most part in today’s kindergartens. If it exists at all, it is made ‘educational” by teaching concepts, such as food groups or the name of utensils. Likewise, art is made “educational” by teaching shapes and walks in nature the names of trees.
The Waldorf approach honors the spirit of early childhood and actively encourages the adults in the care of children to rekindle their connection to enchantment rather than turning children into “little old people”. I have always felt that working with young children is an amazing gift because their innate sense of wonder enables me to see with fresh eyes. Experiencing the reverence and awe by which young children plant seeds in the garden by gently placing them in the ground and giving them a comforting blanket of earth is something that touches one deeply every time.
Similarly, in the elementary school grades, Waldorf education requires that teachers tap into the inspiration that enables them to bring lessons in a lively, artistic manner. They are  encouraged to approach each new main lesson topic with a beginner’s mind. That is, to take as much delight in the various subjects they teach as children do in learning something new. Steiner refers to this capacity as “childlike wonder” which he says is the suitable mood of the teacher.
Since Waldorf main lesson teachers move along through the grades with their class, they have to teach a new curriculum every year. The teacher is usually just one step ahead of the students in learning new material. This is intentional because being an expert in the subject matter is not the point in the lower school grades.
High school students, contrastingly, look for and expect teachers to be experts in the subjects they teach. In the Waldorf High School, therefore, the core curriculum is taught by speciality teachers rather than a main lesson teacher as in the grades.
In the second 7 year cycle, (1st-8th grade) when having a feeling connection to the lessons is so important, indeed, “Childlike wonder is the suitable mood of the Waldorf teacher.”
Written by Gesine Abraham 2025

Waldorf Education: An Artistic Approach and the Intriguing Connection with the Breath

If I had to choose the one thing that is the major distinguishing factor of Waldorf education in the elementary years it would be the fundamental principle that education must take an artistic form. It is not a matter of providing a little sugar to help the medicine go down. It is a matter of understanding in a profound way the quality of consciousness of children in this 2nd seven year cycle. Between the ages of 7 and 14 children are most awake or aware in the feeling realm. They have a picture consciousness and a rhythmical memory.

The mandate of the teacher in a traditional/mainstream approach is to make sure that the children come away from a lesson having learned certain key concepts that can later be recalled and tested. This is very much the case today with the emphasis on accountability via testing.

Steiner (the founder of Waldorf Education) points out that such methods are very convenient because they allow the teacher to verify that the child has absorbed what has been taught in the previous lesson. Unfortunately, such an approach misses the heart of the matter regarding the actual nature of children at this stage of life.

The mandate of the Waldorf main lesson approach is to immerse the children in a lively experience, one that gives them a feeling for things. This holds true for all academic subjects. In teaching Roman history in sixth grade, for example, the teacher prepares by first immersing herself/himself in the subject and then choosing the elements they want to bring to the children. The challenge is to then take this background knowledge and present it in such a way that it appeals to the imagination and feelings of the children and evokes rich inner imagery. As Eugene Schwartz (a seasoned Waldorf Educator) describes ” Through the biographies of noble Romans of the Republic and scheming politicians of the Empire, through the study of the details of constructing aqueducts and the Via Appia, or Roman methods of building a navy and waging war with Carthage, the life of Rome comes alive.” The main lesson format allows the children to be absorbed in that era of history over a period of weeks.

Steiner writes that, “All instruction given to children between approximately seven and thirteen must be permeated with pictures.” The Waldorf teacher’s mandate is to transform the intellectual content so that it speaks to the artistic nature of the child. Facts are still learned, but in a way that does not overtax the intellect and speaks to where the child is developmentally. While providing the children with a lively artistic experience is the objective of the Waldorf approach, a by-product, as it were, is that the children do recall key elements of the lessons.  Research shows that memory is tied to emotion so that experiences that touch us emotionally and evoke inner images are more easily recalled and have more staying power. On the other hand, lessons that lack any feeling connection result in memories that are generally short lived.

Steiner makes the intriguing point that if “we overemphasize the intellect and are unable to move into a mode of imagery, the child’s breathing process is delicately and subtly disrupted. The child can become congested, as it were, with weakened exhalation. You should think of this as subtle, not necessarily obvious.” Further on he writes about how when feelings are cultivated that tend toward imagery it expresses as a “buoyant capacity.”

We overemphasize the intellect when the focus is on having children assimilate sharply outlined ideas and definitions. Such ideas are set and rigid. Lifeless concepts have a restricting effect on the breath. On the other hand, when we teach through the medium of flexible and artistic forms we give children ideas in a pictorial form that has an element of growth. Concepts can grow and metamorphose as the inner life of the child grows. Such an approach has a harmonizing effect on the breath.

I always feel a certain joy when I visit Madrone Trail when the children are present. They have a noticeable liveliness and exuberance that cheers me up and makes me so grateful that this charter school option exists. Visitors often also make a similar observation about the students.

A regular volunteer in the kindergarten, who had many years of experience in numerous other educational settings, told me that when she first visited Madrone Trail she was struck by the quality of the students. She observed that there was something especially vibrant and fresh, something open and friendly, about them. She said she knew right away that this was her place and what she had long been searching for. Another example was told to me by a former Madrone Trail director. He said an electrician spent the day doing repair work at the school. He had no previous knowledge of the charter school or Waldorf education. When he finished his work he went to the director to find out how to enroll in the school. He was so impressed by the cheerfulness and enthusiasm of the children that he wanted to send his children to the school when they were old enough. It seems that the effect on the breath of an artistic approach in education has much to do with this subtle, yet quite palpable, exuberant nature of the students.

Written by Gesine Abraham 2025

Success or Fulfillment?

The below excerpt is from a Wonder With Us Vol.4 interview with the current U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Vivek makes an insightful distinction between success, and fulfillment. He attributes the triad of fame, fortune, and power to the generally understood idea of success. He attributes the triad of relationship, service, and purpose to fulfillment. It is a distinction that has important ramifications for education:

“You’ve mentioned that Mister Rogers is a role model to you. Can you tell us more about that?”

Fred Rogers was, and continues to be, an inspiration. He reminded us what really matters in life — the stuff that we perhaps don’t think about as much, or that just gets papered over sometimes in the busyness of day-to-day life.

One of the things that has been on my mind as I talk to young people around the country is that they feel like they’re caught in the proverbial rat race. I ask students: “What is the version of success that society is telling you you have to pursue? What defines it?” And they usually say some combination of money, fame, and power. If you’re able to acquire all three of those in your life — well, you’ve really made it.

But if you think about it, what all of us want for our kids is that at the end of the day — regardless of what profession they choose or how much money they make, — we want them to be fulfilled. We want our kids, ultimately, at the end of their lives, to be able to say, “That was a good life.” And that triad of success that society has told them to focus on — fame, fortune, power — I think is actually the wrong triad. I think there’s a different triad for fulfillment: relationships, purpose, and service.

Our engagement in these three things is what fundamentally drives whether or not we are fulfilled or not in our life. And one of the things I love about Fred Rogers is that he helped us see that relationships really do matter, that helping other people is important, and that building your life — even as a child — around the notion that you can contribute something to other people’s lives or the world really can make a difference.

I actually think this is what kids — fundamentally, at a deep level — want, too. They know the value of service. When kids engage in service to each other, a lot of times, they will say they feel better doing it. When they have friendships where they can really be themselves and be there for other people, they know that feels good, too. So, I would love for us to think collectively about how that can be a more explicit part of the culture that we build, the initiatives that we create, and the curricula that we design.”

(Excerpt link:

The fulfillment triad is explicitly at the heart of the cultural renewal that is the mission of Waldorf education. When I came across Vivek’s interview it brought to mind observations made by teachers who regularly taught Waldorf graduates who moved on after 8th grade to local high schools. The comments below were published by AWSNA, The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.

“A 2005 survey of some Waldorf graduates indicated that the typical Waldorf student goes into the world with a love of learning, the ability to think independently, a commitment to human relations, an interest in and concern for other human beings and for the natural environment, and a desire to make the world a better place.”

“Waldorf students share certain common characteristics. They are often independent and self-confident self starters. They have genuine optimism for the future. They also tend to be highly ethical and are compassionately intelligent. They keep their sense of wonder about learning and the interdisciplinary sense that everything is connected.  They seem to have a healthy measure of emotional intelligence. They are both artistic and practical. They seem to know intuitively how to do many things.”

“Marin, Ca. Waldorf students to me are interesting people. They can converse intelligently on almost any issue because they have been taught to examine. They can be enormously sympathetic to almost anyone’s plight because they have been taught to tolerate. They can gracefully dance or score a goal because they have been taught to move. They can circulate among the various groups on campus and engage in a variety of activities because they have been taught to harmonize.”

Written by Gesine Abraham 2024

What makes Waldorf education so enduring and relevant more than 100 years after its inception?

“We shouldn’t ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order?  Instead we should ask: what lives in each human being and what can be developed in him or her?  Only then will it be possible to direct the new quality of each emerging generation into society.  The society will become what young people, as whole human beings, make out of the existing social conditions.  The new generation should not just be made to be what the present society wants it to become.”  Rudolph Steiner (Founder of Waldorf Education)
Steiner’s life work led to contributions in many fields including: architecture, biodynamic gardening, painting, eurythmy, curative education, esoteric teachings, and economics.  The connecting link between all of these endeavors is the mission of cultural renewal.  The first Waldorf school opened in 1919 which was close to the end of Steiner’s life in 1925. Waldorf education was the crown of Steiner’s life work and addresses the mission of cultural renewal at the most causal level.
If we look at education reforms over past decades, we see that various trends come and go, reflecting shifting perceived needs and values of the times.  Often, economic and or political influences play an oversized role. What makes Waldorf education so enduring and relevant 100 years after it’s inception is that the goal is, in the words of the Waldorf educator, Rahima Baldwin Dancy, “not to inculcate any particular ideology or particular point of view, but rather to make children so healthy, strong, and inwardly free that they would become a kind of tonic for society as a whole.” The wonderful holistic, art’s integrated and developmentally appropriate Waldorf teaching methods and curriculum are valuable in themselves, but they take on deeper meaning in the context of this wider purpose.
 One of the important reasons for teachers staying with the same group of children for multiple years is to enable the teacher to truly penetrate into “what lives in each human being.”  As parents, what lives most especially in our heart is that our child’s teacher really knows our child on the level of his or her core essence.  Penetrating beyond outer or superficial personality traits to the deeper essence of the child is an acknowledged and important mandate for Waldorf teachers.
  A critical point in the Steiner quote above is that it is as “whole human beings” that the emerging generation is able to bring healthy new impulses into society.  It makes a big difference if a child’s strength— be it of head, heart, or will—is fostered in a one-sided way or in a balanced way.  It makes a big difference if a talent or gift is fostered in a spirit of gaining a competitive edge or in a spirit of contributing to the good of the whole.
Written by Gesine Abraham 2024