The Waldorf Way

By David Ruenzel

In American education, the notion of developing the "whole person'' has been around forever. This is why our schools have long encouraged students to do everything from excel in math and play in the band to climb ropes and sing in musicals. At the Pine Hill Waldorf School in Wilton, N.H., however, the idea of educating the whole person hasn't led to an exhaustive string of extracurricular activities but is instead seamlessly integrated into every aspect of daily practice. Everyone at Pine Hill does most everything well--from playing the recorder to freehand drawing of geometric patterns--and all with a sort of contemplative reserve that seems, in its absence of competitive striving, almost un-American.

"A Waldorf education is like a toolbox for life,'' one Pine Hill teacher told me. Another Waldorf teacher who is also a Pine Hill alumnus said, "Confidence is the greatest gift my schooling gave me. Once you find your way into something, be it pottery or auto mechanics, you feel like you can find your way into anything else because you've learned that everything is interrelated, even if it appears otherwise.''

Watching the students at Pine Hill work, I found myself envious for what I'd never had. Although I was a child of the suburbs, complacently middle-class, my own schooling left me with a sense of inadequacy that still nags after all these years. The notion of "giftedness'' reigned then as it does now, and hence those of us who were not gifted--the great majority--came to define ourselves as much by what we could not do as by what we could. I, for instance, learned that I could not "do'' music, art, or higher math. It seemed clear to me that these things were the province of budding experts and that the rest of us best not enter. Why attempt that at which we...