Edited and introduced by Diana Hughes and John Kettle.

This selection of fourteen essays…offers a variety of responses to the questions of what Waldorf schools are and how these schools work. The first two, John Gardner’s “What is a Waldorf School?” and Reg Down’s “The Role of the Teacher-Artist Within the Waldorf School,” offer the most direct responses to the questions, though from very different lines of approach.

The largest group of essays offers glimpses of teachers at work in the classroom or mulling over challenges they have faced. This is the heart of the Waldorf approach, brought into the classroom through the organization of the curriculum and the skill and sensitivity of the teacher.

Following these are essays dealing with what remain two of the most contentious problems Waldorf schools and Waldorf school parents wrestle with: the religious impulse, as Henry Barnes profoundly analyzes it, and the adolescent sexual impulse, as it appeared to Rudolf Steiner. Helmut von Kugelgen reviews Steiner’s determined stance on keeping the schools independent of government influence, a position now being reexamined by teachers and parents. And finally, we reprint a report from the German news magazine Der Spiegel on the success of Waldorf school pupils after graduati