Waldorf News

The New Normal: Teaching Students in Grades 5-12 Now

The New Normal: Teaching Students in Grades 5-12 Now

by Stephen Sagarin, 2025

We can easily make a list of the terrible influences besetting us and, especially, our adolescent children and students.

Social media. Screen addiction. Climate catastrophizing. Political division and polarization. The “manosphere.” Effects of the pandemic, which seem to linger longer than expected.

You can add your own to the list. Although the influences are many, the solutions, I think are relatively few. The causes of anxiety or depression may be many, but addressing these doesn’t necessarily require a new prescription in each case.

Context

Before I get to all of that, I think it’s fair to give you some context for the rest of my remarks.

First, it’s important to remember that Rudolf Steiner never spoke about Waldorf education!

He spoke about child development and teaching and learning. He spoke about a healthful transformation of education for the modern world. He wished to educate children and students in order to help the world become a more peaceful and just place, in the aftermath of World War 1, the “War to End All Wars.” Oops.

And he pictured a creative education as a good way to do this. He called it “artistic,” because back then the word “creative” wasn’t used in the same way we now use it. But he didn’t mean just creativity in art, but also in science, in technological innovation, in social relationships, in diplomacy, in any human endeavor.

It is we—teachers, parents, board members—who have created “Waldorf education” over the past century or so. It must be pretty good or we wouldn’t be in this room together. But we also have a lot of work to do to fully honor Steiner’s intentions.

In particular, I believe we have to continually address a central tension: The tension between Germany in 1920 and the United States of 2025.

How Germans thought about and perceived the world, and what they needed by way of education, is likely similar in some ways and very different in other ways from who our students are and what our students need today.

I want to draw your attention to these points of view, even though I intend my talk to go in a different direction, so that you know where I’m coming from. We have to take seriously what is of value in Steiner’s work, and we have to work hard to make it right for us and our children.

Protection

Here’s a first point: We all agree that children need protection, I believe.

Protection from all kinds of harmful influences. Everyone agrees, even people whose children go to schools that aren’t Waldorf schools.

In particular, the world we have created asks children to grow up too fast. To be sexy before they’re ready, to become consumers and bother their parents to buy all kinds of things for them, to desire brand-name products that won’t be healthful for them, to take an ironic or skeptical or cynical or critical stance before they can authentically do so.

Rudolf Steiner also describes “protection” for children as central to their education. (Two accompanying virtues, that I won’t go into this evening, are these: Reverence or veneration, particularly for the gifts of the past, and enthusiasm, especially for the possibilities of the future. A world that tears down reverence too early, or that portrays a dismal future, is not a world that will allow us to educate our children healthfully.)

Liberation and Maturation

There comes a time, however, around age 13, 14, or 15, when the world stops asking us to grow up too quickly. Instead, it flips, all of a sudden, to pressuring us and our children not to grow up any more. Not to think for ourselves, not to develop discernment, not to mature.

To stay “forever young,” so that we are still idealistic and malleable and can be turned into a consuming pawn or fodder for political propaganda.

Our jobs as parents and teachers becomes a bit different as students enter middle school and the beginning of high school—of course we still need to protect children from unhealthy influences, but we also need to assist them in maturing and liberating themselves from the forces that would keep them from their full humanity.

The “Vulnerability Gap”

I’d like to add one more wrinkle to this circumstance before talking about how we can help students through this period of their lives.

You may have heard that children are maturing physically at a younger age than they did in previous centuries. Maybe this is true. Some research suggests that the onset of puberty is still roughly the same, but that the changes of puberty are generally accomplished more quickly.

So our children and students reach physical maturity earlier than they would have 100 or 200 years ago. We can debate the reasons, but the phenomenon is clear.

My whole career I’ve heard parents and teachers ask if we should adjust curricula to address this earlier maturation. But it’s not so simple. Because, while physical maturity is often reached earlier, emotional maturity, the result of adolescent development, occurs later and later, or is attenuated or stretched further into adulthood.

Betty Staley calls this period between an early development in puberty and later development in adolescence a “vulnerability gap,” and I think that’s a great name for it.

Our work with young people in this vulnerability gap, from roughly 5th or 6th grade through to about 11th grade, requires us to continue to protect what should be protected, but to focus also on what we can do to liberate our students, to help them grow into emotionally mature adults who are creative, inwardly free, ethical individuals.

I believe there are at least five ways we may do this. Just as I invited you to add your own list of unhealthful influences at the start of this talk, I invite you to consider what I am about to present and to modify this list as necessary.

1. Freedom and responsibility

As children mature to become young adults, it is essential that we give them appropriate and increasing amounts of freedom. Eventually, they will get the car keys, get the right to vote.

In considering at what age they obtain certain freedoms, we should consider that freedom always comes with responsibility, and that abuse of freedom incurs a consequence.

We should recall that when we were young, we always made perfect, safe use of every freedom we were given.

Okay. We probably didn’t. And our students won’t.

So we have to be ready to help them navigate consequences, make any necessary restitution, and get back on track. (It is terrible to announce consequences, to establish an appropriate fence, and then to move the fence rather than deal with the wrath and disappointment of a young adult who has stepped out of bounds; we teach just the wrong lesson.)

2. Individualization and creativity

Similarly, we should provide increasing assignments, projects, internships, and opportunities for students to develop their own interests and talents. Some students may change interests monthly; others may stick to a plan from childhood through to adulthood.

Regardless, pouring them into one mold—one idea of a morning lesson book, for instance—will increasingly constrain them as they get older.

One of my most memorable students is a successful bladesmith who was able to come to school for academic classes in the morning, and then leave to spend afternoons in his shop. He didn’t get a full Waldorf education, but he got what he needed.

3. Ideas and Ideals

If the first time students read Ralph Waldorf Emerson or WEB DuBois is in high school, we have missed an opportunity to appeal to their idealism in middle school.

Steiner advocated reading Schiller, Goethe, Homer, and Milton, among others, between the ages of 10 and 14. These are idealistic writers at a high level.

If our curriculum is slower in grades 1 to 3, it must accelerate in grades 4 through 8, not by piling on more homework or wading through more material, but by becoming richer and deeper.

If our literature and history doesn’t appeal to ideals (while, of course, acknowledging the brutality of history from beginning to end), we are not serving our students. This doesn’t mean all happy endings; but it means the pursuit of meaning.

4. Challenge

Some recent non-Waldorf research shows that if you ask middle schoolers to choose between a creative writing exercise and rolling a rock up a hill, even if it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done, the middle schoolers will choose the rock more often than not.

We should keep this in mind as we approach the education of middle school and high school students. What rocks, real and metaphorical, can we invite them to roll up what meaningful hills? If we don’t offer challenge, even risk, our students will seek their own, often unhealthfully.

5. Conscious, ethical use of technology

Joseph Weizenbaum, computer scientist at MIT, pioneer in artificial intelligence, and friend of Steiner’s anthroposophy, pointed out that all technology, because it arises from and is situated in human society, always brings with it three simultaneous possibilities for its use: The good, the bad, and the stupid.

Instead of talking about computers, which he built by hand in the 1950s, he used an axe as an example. You can use an axe to cut firewood. You can use an axe to kill someone. And you can use an axe to accidentally cut off your own foot. Anything we can do to dispel techno-optimism and techno-utopianism will help our students.

Further, we become beholden to technology that we don’t understand. Its illusion of magic and mystery has a hold over us that we can dispel if we simply know how things work.

In Steiner’s time, that included the telephone and the internal combustion engine. In our day, smartphones and AI. I’ve created a course at our school in the history of technology, with the aim of demystifying just those contemporary devices and inventions for 9th graders.

The spur was my daughter, who, in 4th grade, was sad because, as she said, “I’ll never be as smart as a computer.” Of course, I told her, a computer is as smart as a hammer. Without a human user, a computer is a system of inert switches with no intelligence of its own.

Middle school and high school

Most of what I have to say applies to students beginning in roughly grades 5 or 6 and continuing through at least the end of high school. In Waldorf schools, this speaks to the need for good relationships and understanding between middle school and high school teachers and between lower schools and upper schools.

If 8th graders have no computers, and 9th graders have laptops and Wifi, we are missing an opportunity to create a healthful onramp between no technology and all technology. If 8th graders are still making borders on pre-bound main lesson books, and high school students are completing individualized independent projects, again, there’s an opportunity for a real conversation about the value of some conventional practices.

If 8th graders have almost no freedom, and high school students have a lot more—how they dress, how they act, what is expected of them, again, we might consider the transition more carefully.

And, finally, if 8th graders reach the end of 8th grade feeling “done” with Waldorf and Steiner, not realizing what riches lie in store in the high school, then we have work to do.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that my suggestions for teaching middle and high school students would have been true before the pandemic, before AI.

That’s because the new normal is a lot like the old normal. Today we talk about “the anxious child.” Thirty years ago, we were worried about “the hurried child.” Two hundred years ago, we fretted about the influence of novels. In 750 BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod bemoaned the then-new Iron Age.

As long as we’ve had children to raise, we have worried about the unhealthful influences of the world into which they are growing.

These unhealthful influences are real. But, in consciously promoting a healthful education for our students, we strengthen them so that they are less likely to succumb to any unhealthful influences, now and, especially, in the unknown, uncertain future.

View this article at Stephen’s blog.

Download this article as a pdf.

Stephen Keith Sagarin, PhD, is Associate Professor and Director of Waldorf High School Teacher Education at Sunbridge Institute, NY. He is also Director, co-founder, and teacher at Berkshire Waldorf High School, MA. Dr. Sagarin has taught history of education at Teachers College, NY, and human development at the City University of New York. He is the author of How the Future Can Save Us: Fresh Perspectives on Waldorf Education and The Story of Waldorf Education in the United States: Past, Present, and Future. Dr. Sagarin is the former Editor of the Research Bulletin of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education. His blog “What is Education?” may be found at ssagarin.blogspot.com. Dr. Sagarin has a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA in art history and fine art from Princeton University.