Like any Waldorf school, High Mowing derives its very life from an understanding that each human being - with profound spiritual, moral, and physical capacities - enters the world in order to find a chosen destiny in life. The curriculum thus springs from the nature of the unfolding human being, addressing inner capacities in the student that are most alive and active at a given age.

In the high school years, we are mainly concerned with new capacities of thought and independent judgment, often accompanied by a welter of unsettled feelings and idealistic strivings. While young people are experiencing many physical changes, they also awaken with new clarity to an intellectual awareness.

Artistic activity plays a crucial role at this time, for it serves both to deepen experience and to calm and balance the chaos in the feeling life. Now, more than ever, the teacher must infuse the school day with beauty and artistry - in the setting of the class, the manner of speaking, the elegance of scientific demonstration or mathematical proof. The objective is not that the students learn art, but that they learn artistically.

Since it is the immediate human relationship between teacher and student that makes for effective learning, Waldorf educators teach out of their own living knowledge and experience of the subject matter; they are not simply transmitters of facts. For this reason, we make limited use of textbooks and audio-visual aids. Indeed, in most "block classes," students create their own "block books" as records of their experience in the course; in "track classes," textbooks serve more as reference and review than as instructions to new topics.

As teachers we may perceive some measure of success in our work if our students graduate around the age of eighteen possessed of a body of knowledge and a repertoire of skills needed to step into collegiate studies or other walks of life. At a deeper level, however, we measure our success by the degree to which our graduates go into the world possessed also of a certain surety, an inner balance, a confidence in life and its possibilities. Our school is not simply college preparatory; it is life preparatory.