From LCWS Alumnus, Jonas Powell, Class of 2014:
To me, the value of a Waldorf education (in particular, the high school) is, fundamentally, that it directly strives to develop the student’s ability to perceive Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, rather than treating the student’s mind as a dumping site for a disconnected pile of factoids.
I don’t want this to sound esoteric, since it really isn’t. A sensitivity to these three is the core of any successful endeavor, very much including the hard sciences and engineering. My life has shown that this can work: after attending LCWS from pre-k through 12th grade, I went on to get my undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s in astrophysics at Wesleyan University, culminating in a thesis on computationally modeling the dynamics of a couple stellar systems; after that, I spent nearly two years in the AI world working for a defense contractor, and I have just recently accepted an offer to go do AI work on vehicle sensor data for the electric car manufacturer Rivian. The reason I bring up my biography here is that I want to be clear that I am speaking from experience: Waldorf and the hard sciences are very, very compatible, and I hope that my path can be evidence of this.
Having hopefully convinced you that my contributions here are not just theoretical, let’s get back to the perception of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness and its role in a successful life (by whatever definition may be appropriate). The value of this perception is clear in the arts and humanities: these fields are dedicated to the study of the meanings of Beauty and Good. However, it can be less immediately clear why the sciences rely on this perception, and I think this is where a lot of the misunderstanding around Waldorf’s relationship to the sciences arises from.
This point—the relationship between science and TBG—actually has a pretty substantial body of philosophical inquiry behind it, but to me, the most accessible discussion of it comes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when the author reflects on the actual scientific process (bear with me for one paragraph of metaphysics). Science, he claims, is not the aggregation of facts, but rather the selection of hypotheses (for example, you could think of infinite ways of explaining why the Sun rises in the morning). We clearly don’t actually explore every possible hypothesis when trying to answer a question; that would take forever. Rather, we use our sense of Good (you could also call this intuition) to narrow down the set of plausible hypotheses before applying our rigorous evaluation. This, the author points out, is crucial: humans are not computers that iterate over all possible explanations, but rather we lean on what is basically a developed sense of well-informed preference to make our decisions.
This relationship between Beauty/Goodness and science has come up in the scientific literature, as well. I won’t go too deeply into that now, but will instead briefly point to the words of Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, who says “It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.” Many of math and physics’ most powerful minds, particularly in the early 20th century, were explicitly fascinated with this, and recognized that science is not the dreary process of arithmetic, but rather an intense, intuitive, and (dare I say) aesthetic process, not fundamentally different from the problem the painter faces when figuring out where to lay their next stroke.
Imagine my surprise when, having come out of a life of Waldorf and bracing for the cold, hard objectivity of physics, I discovered this! Ever since, I have found it to be true. Beauty and elegance can be leaned on as real, functional guides in both the scientific process and in engineering. Now the only problem left is to figure out what the hell they actually are. This is where Waldorf comes back in.
It is undoubtedly true that Waldorf students graduate with less knowledge in the sciences than their counterparts in other educational systems. Our science classes top out pretty substantially below where other schools’ STEM programs finish (I’m going to leave the arts be, but suffice it to say that Waldorf students are exceptional artists and writers relative to their peers in college). The reality of this gap in rote knowledge (and the delta in standardized test scores that accompanies it) has led to much consternation in the parents of prospective Waldorf high schoolers, who are afraid that by not being prepared in that way, their students will not be able to get into good schools or go on in the sciences.
To me, though, this fear totally misses the point of the Waldorf education: what you get in exchange for that deficit of rote knowledge is a flourishing perception of Elegance (the word I’ve settled on to represent the Truth/Beauty/Goodness trinity). Waldorf nurtures this sense of elegance from many different directions: the crafts (woodwork, metalwork, handwork) are perhaps the most obvious situation in which we develop the ability to discern functional beauty (i.e. a clean seam, a consistent edge, or smooth heat), but in painting, chorus, eurythmy, and foreign languages, we are also taught to perceive what Good means in everyday life.
This sense of Elegance has, hopefully by now unsurprisingly, has been a far more useful tool to me in my life after high school than any particular factoid that I could have learned in some AP class. Why? Because those factoids are profoundly learnable; they’re literally the reason we go to college. The ability to discern Elegance, however, is a lifelong journey that requires active development. Sure, this will make the Waldorf student’s first year or two in college harder, as they struggle with a Calc 2 class surrounded by peers who just took the exact same class in high school the year before. But it will pay off doubly down the road: first, when the courses get hard for everyone else (who have been yawning their way through the intro classes), the Waldorf student will already be used to working their butt off and will have the study habits in place to continue that; and second (more importantly), once the Waldorf student leaves the world of graded homework assignments and enters either scientific research or the professional world, they are significantly better prepared to handle the ambiguity and messiness of problems that don’t have clear answers. The student who took AP Physics in high school has been trained to become an expert at spitting out the right answer to a pre-approved problem. Research, though, doesn’t work that way: how do you even begin to use that test-taking mindset to turn hundreds of gigabytes of numbers into something of scientific value? Here, understanding context and being able to formulate your own question (rather than reading the question from the textbook) is essential. This is even more clear in industry, where there may not even be a body of academic literature to lean on, but rather just a stakeholder coming to me with a problem and relying on me to not just solve it, but frame it in a way that makes it solvable.
Ultimately, this boils the Waldorf value proposition down to a couple of neat little slogans: “Learn how to think, not what to think” is one; “The right question is more valuable than the right answer” is another way of getting to a similar point. Other schools will happily burn four years of the student’s life impressing upon them what to think and ask them to then return the right answer. Waldorf will develop the student’s ability to ask the right question. And to me, that has proven far more valuable.