ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book starts with Rudolf Steiner the man and his ideas about the spiritual dimension of life and about how knowledge can be generated, including knowledge of the world not accessible to people senses – the spiritual world. It introduces and explains a series of generative principles that underpin Waldorf practice in terms of teaching and learning, and then looks at Waldorf schools as learning communities. It then summarizes the existing research on the education and gives a brief overview of the international growth of the Waldorf movement. The book also restricts itself to Waldorf education in schools, which typically teach children and young people from the age of 6 to 18/19 years. There are three factors that make understanding and writing about Steiner in English particularly challenging.
