Waldorf Education: Inspiring a Lifetime of Learning |
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Open a World of Wonder for Your Child The early childhood years are critical in determining how children adjust to, and embrace the complex world around them. Your child will spend more waking hours at school than at home. If you would like those hours to be spent in a creative and caring atmosphere where art and learning is nurtured everyday, we invite you to consider the Waldorf School of Pittsburgh. Waldorf education is like no other. Specially trained teachers present lessons in ways that are deeply meaningful to the child. When children relate what they learn to their own experience, they are interested and alive, and what they learn becomes their own. The curriculum touches the whole child, nurturing growth physically, emotionally, intellectually, morally and spiritually. Waldorf is an education for today - and for a lifetime The purpose of the Waldorf School of Pittsburgh is to educate children using Waldorf curriculum and methods of teaching which acknowledge and honor balance of the academic, emotional and spiritual needs in child development and seeks to engage families in education to create learning partnerships; and to create a community of head, heart and hands learning opportunities for the various audiences in the larger Pittsburgh area. The aim of Waldorf education, as stated by its founder, is "to develop free human beings who are able, in themselves, to impart purpose and direction to their lives." This can only be done through educating the whole child -- head, heart, and hand -- toward the three great ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness. These three ideals taken together set the standard of education at a Waldorf school. Rudolf Steiner expresses them in the following way: "The need [is] for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility -- these three forces are the very nerve of education" |
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This goal of education, to
develop a balance of intellectual achievement, spiritual growth, physical
health and personal responsibility, is based on a profound understanding
of the process of human development. Each subject is introduced to the child
when he or she is most ready for it, and in a manner to which the child
is naturally receptive at that stage. Year by year, the content of the
curriculum expands with the ever-growing powers of the child, nourishing
the inner life successively through stories from fairy tales, legends, myths
and history, and the outer life with the development of individual and
social skills. Waldorf education recognizes the uniqueness of the individual
and the spiritual in life. It lays the foundation for a truly healthy adult
attitude by developing the child's sense of beauty, wonder, and interest
in the world of nature and in all humanity.
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