The following comments come from a presentation at a panel discussion in support of Waldorf high schools.  Since it is a speech, no citations are provided, however, citations regarding specific material will be provided upon request.  It should be noted that some of the benefits provided by a Waldorf high school are also provided in other intentional schools where SEL (social and emotional learning) curricula are used, but this talk is specific to Waldorf schools.

“There is a lot of general support for Waldorf education from neuroscience, but the evidence for why the Waldorf approach to high school is particularly effective comes from an area called social and affective neuroscience, basically, the science of emotions and how we relate to each other.

Sometime around 8^th grade, the cerebral cortex starts growing like never before.  The cerebral cortex, or neocortex, is the outer layer of the brain, about 3 mm thick, that governs logical, rational thought, decision making, and other metacognitive, or self-reflective thought processes.  None of that seems to have much to do with emotion, but it turns out that emotion affects our ability to apply rational thought effectively.  Since we obviously understand that teenagers do not magically develop rational thought overnight, it is vital to help these abilities grow effectively, which we do by creating a curriculum that carefully scaffolds the development of ethical thought.  After all, the goal of education is to cultivate a repertoire of cognitive and behavioral strategies that will allow them to succeed outside of school as well as in school.

What affective neuroscience tells us is that reasoning, decision-making, and processes related to language, reading, and math do not function correctly without emotion.  Emotions affect performance and learning, as well as our ability to recruit previously learned material and apply what we have learned in school to decisions and situations in the rest of our lives, even in nonemotional contexts.  We know this through experiments with people who lose their ability to have emotions due to stroke or brain injury in their frontal lobe, whose ability to make rational, non-emotion based decisions is sharply impaired.

Waldorf is a community based education that uses social strategies to make academic decisions on a daily basis.  Main lessons intentionally recruit emotions, and rather than focusing on pure volume of content, Waldorf schools use a contextual, hands-on approach to learning that is imbued with emotion and real life application and relevance at every turn.

One neuro study recommended using stories with binary opposites to scaffold ethical thinking, which would lead to increased ability to apply rational thought outside of the classroom.  The Waldorf 9^th grade curriculum does exactly that, focusing on sharp contrasts in every main lesson, good vs. evil, right and wrong: very simple, clear choices.  Directly after the neocortex starts to grow exponentially, the high school immediately begins to scaffold ethical thinking.  As the curriculum progresses, the situations presented in main lesson increase in complexity, scaffolding the development of ethical thinking and infusing emotion into every aspect of critical thought.

The reason that it is so important that this type of thinking is intentionally scaffolded is because two students who perform at the same level independently, say, a 9^th grade level, tend to increase in ability linearly in parallel to each other.  However, a student who has multiple opportunities to practice new learning in a social context that is aided by an expert, like a teacher, may present at a 9^th grade level when working independently, but in the correct social context, he or she may be able to act at a 10^th, or even 12^th grade level.  The increase in ability shows marked jumps from skill level to skill level, eventually ending at a much higher level than they would have reached without support.

There is a reason that people meet Waldorf students and are deeply impressed with their ability to learn and work together effectively.  In most schools, teachers and parents scaffold ethical development, but in Waldorf schools, it is scaffolded by teachers, parents, and the curriculum itself.  By working overtly with socio-ethical thinking, all academic learning is imbued with emotional relevance, allowing for better retention of the material learned in high school, an increased ability to think rationally, and an improved facility for applying learned knowledge when making decisions in the rest of their lives.”  -November 17, 2010