Long-time master Waldorf teacher David Sloan, who just stepped back from 27 years of teaching in WHiSTEP this past summer, has a new book coming out soon. The book, Keeping Ideals Intact: A Waldorf Teacher’s Forty-Year Perspective,  contains the collected writings and talks given over a long and distinguished career. Here we are sharing the Foreward to the collection, written by former CfA Executive Director, Douglas Gerwin, and one of David’s more recent pieces, The “Dramatic” Question: Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Appreciation?

Enjoy, and please be sure to purchase the book when it comes out!

Click here to read David’s July 27, 2025 Commencement Address to the Antioch & WHiSTEP Graduates. 

Douglas Gerwin: Foreword

 “So, tell me, what makes Waldorf different?”

Spend even a brief time in a Waldorf school, whether as a teacher, staff member, parent, or even a student, and you are bound to confront a version of this question. In characterizing (while, one hopes, never defining) Waldorf education, you may find yourself falling back on a string of descriptors that end with the same syllable “ic”:  would it be fair for you to describe a Waldorf approach to teaching as being holistic? artistic? phenomenologic? classic? How about “developmentally anthropocentric”?

Though it can be argued these terms highlight core features of a Waldorf school, they don’t quite capture the distinct nature of a pedagogy that defies the commonly accepted division of educational practices into liberally progressive or traditionally conservative camps.  You could say a Waldorf school belongs in both categories, but that would be because, in essence, it is neither. 

Consider three simple examples that illustrate this conundrum:

1. though fundamentally student centered (like many a progressive school), a Waldorf classroom is decidedly teacher led (as you would expect of a more traditional school)
2. while venerating the specific cultural rituals and customs of its local community (such as the celebration of seasonal festivals), Waldorf schools often challenge assumptions and commonly accepted traditions of conventional education (such as the repeated administration of multiple-choice tests)
3.  with enthusiasm, Waldorf schools embrace the spirit of modernity, yet they largely eschew––especially during the early childhood and elementary years––the use of digital aids to teaching.

As the graduate of an American Waldorf school and subsequently a high school teacher in several others, I will attest to at least one distinctive and possibly unique element underlying the full span of Waldorf education, from earliest pre-school through senior high school. I will call it: “the seminal art of telling a story in a pedagogically honest and developmentally appropriate way.” To borrow a phrase from the anthology of essays on Waldorf education now in your hands, storytelling serves as “primary vehicle for the schooling of the soul”, albeit in quite different ways during early childhood, elementary grades, and especially high school years.

At the risk of oversimplifying the case, Waldorf education posits that pre-school children learn most effectively through the outer enactment of stories (often simple yet deeply experienced), whereas elementary school pupils think and learn through stories progressively interiorized by being lifted artistically into richly felt inner pictures.

And what of teenagers? They, too, continue to be nourished by stories, both enacted (for instance, on stage) and imagined (through a rich palette of the expressive arts). However, with the advent of high school a third and perhaps more subtle form of learning through story becomes more explicit; specifically, through a disciplined and imaginative way of thinking, students can come to relate something they already know to something they do not––or do not yet––know. This way of learning can be nurtured through the practiced use of metaphor, analogy, simile, and other forms of comparison in which a bridge is built from something familiar to something unfamiliar, from something sense perceptible to something inaccessible to sense perception, ultimately from something indwelling to something transcendent. Let us say, then, that in high school a distinctive and possibly unique Waldorf approach to learning is analog-ic.  In the study of the sciences, this approach could be called, more precisely, ecolog-ic.[1]

At this point, you may well counter that good teachers in any educational institution draw upon analogies, almost instinctively, as a way of enlivening their lessons. In Waldorf schools, however, this approach is elevated to the rank of a carefully trained and skillfully practiced art. It’s akin to the difference between whistling or humming while you work compared to training your voice as a professional singer.

In order for this approach to be effective as a mode of education, a teacher’s choice of analogy or metaphor needs to resonate as being truthful in the heart and mind of the student who hears or reads it. It succeeds not because the teacher formulates a persuasive logical comparison but because the student spontaneously experiences a feeling of its self-evident veracity. Put differently, you respond to an analogy not by accepting someone else’s rational conclusion but by summoning up your own powers of judgment. Your response to a lesson couched in terms of analogy is more likely to be “Yes, that makes sense to me” than “OK, I will accept what you say.”

Herein lies a key to understanding the significance of teaching through analogy or metaphor in a Waldorf high school. Above all, during these tender years, adolescents yearn for an education that deliberately calls upon their own burgeoning powers of judgment––“what makes sense to me”––rather than a pedagogy that encourages, perhaps even commands, them to absorb and reiterate what others tell them, whether in school or on the playground or on TikTok.  

Like healthy fruit, vegetables, fish, or raw meat, analogies and metaphors are most satisfying when they are fresh to the taste; if they become stale––that is, too familiar––they easily slide into cliché. They will, however,  provide extra flavor and lasting nutritive value if, more than simply enlarging the scope of your own immediate experience, they simultaneously point beyond themselves to some greater meaning. In the playful words of the celebrated literary critic Northop Frye, what else is a “meta-” “phor”?[2]

Perhaps most important of all, teaching through an analogical approach leaves students free to make for themselves the necessary cognitive leap between the known and the not-yet-known, the evident and the hidden, the specific and the universal, instead of accepting––whether skeptically or simply without challenge––their teachers’ explications of worldly or otherworldly realities.

As with any free action requiring the ignition of the student’s own judgment, teaching by means of analogies can be subject to misuse, distortion, even manipulation, as in the case of a teacher who appropriates rhetorical powers of persuasion, driven perhaps  by a personal agenda, to shout down or mislead the student’s own nascent voice of discernment. In other words, there is a crucial moral element in teaching by analogy that presumes a sacred bond of trust between teacher and student, in which the teacher is tapping into some immanent cosmic lawfulness without explicitly naming it.  Any violation of this trust, for whatever reason, will come at great cost, because abuse of pedagogical power constitutes spiritual fraud –– and, as we learn from Dante’s Divine Comedy, those who commit fraud belong in the lowest rung of hell.

To unearth a true treasure trove of analogical lessons, with no trace of counterfeit, we need turn no further than to the latest anthology of radiant essays on Waldorf education by David Sloan. A consummate high school English teacher, teacher of teachers, and celebrated director of countless student and adult performances, David has drawn upon his talks to parents, eulogies of colleagues, commencement addresses, and sundry articles on education to amass a sterling collection that demonstrates just how to educate by means of metaphor and analogy. Read, for instance, how he relates the experience of emerging adolescence to the ardors of portage on a canoeing trip, or  how learning to scallop the flow of a river in tandem with a fellow paddler represents what he calls the ultimate social challenge. (“If you and your partner don’t work together,” he observes, “you will literally ‘go round in circles.’ ”) Elsewhere in this collection, see how he compares the experience of students posing a new question during classroom discussion to their diving from a high cliff into a deep mountain pool; as he puts it, “asking questions means taking a kind of risk, living with uncertainty, which always demands a level of courage.”

In his two previous books on Waldorf high school education, David explored his approach to teaching adolescents through the lenses of drama and literature. In this latest and more wide-ranging collection, he adumbrates such disparate yet related themes as celebrating the festival of the dead, leading summertime wilderness treks, contrasting the ephemeral quality of “character resume” with the lasting merits of  “eulogy virtues”, or illuminating the advantages and pitfalls of distance learning by analogy to the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin weaving seductive threads of glistening gold. And in an uncharacteristically soft-spoken appeal, David offers a muted defense of what he calls the Quiet Ones, those gifted and unsung introverted students “who enjoy solitude over socializing, and who prefer introspection to external stimuli.” I would have been so grateful to have been one of his high school students.       

Finally, in drawing  upon the metaphoric wisdom inherent in the stories of ancient mythology, David invokes the rituals of the Dionysian and Apollonian mystery schools to underscore the significance of the “Morning Verse” that Waldorf students around the globe recite at the start of each school day. Implicit in this ritual David discerns the spiritual mission lying at the heart of Waldorf education: “to teach young people to appreciate and nurture that relationship between the inner and the outer, between the human being and the world, and between the visible and the invisible”.

And how best to cultivate these soul capacities? By doing what David has accomplished so nimbly with his students for more than 40 years and now, you will discover, so successfully with this anthology: namely, to inspire a form of analogic, metaphoric cognition––he calls it “acrobatic” thinking––which links the quotidian to the timeless, the material to the metaphysical, your own creative self to the created world and vice versa, in such a way that, like a scientific poet or poetic scientist, you learn to

. . . see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.[3]

– Douglas Gerwin, Executive Director
Research Institute for Waldorf Education