12th Grade Curriculum

The twelve years of Waldorf education have sometimes been compared to a giant tower set in a vast expanse of landscape. In first grade, one enters at the ground level of this tower and begins to climb a long spiral staircase. At each level (or floor) of the tower, one can look out through a window that gives a partial perspective on the surrounding landscape.

Some curricular "windows" are set above one another, though at different turns of the spiral (for example, the "windows" at the levels of grades 7 and 11, or of grades 8 and 9). While it is beneficial, of course, to have climbed the full twelve-year staircase, it is remarkable how swiftly students who join the climb later on can catch up -- thanks in part to periodic returns to the subjects, though each time at a different level and with different purpose.

Approaching the twelfth grade level, the seniors push open a trap door in the roof of the tower, as it were, and step out onto an open turret. Now, for the first time, they survey the full panorama of the landscape that they previously glimpsed from eleven preceding perspectives.

In other words, the senior year is intended, on the one hand, to be the gradual synthesis of the education -- the great stock-taking and preparation for the next stage in learning -- and, on the other, the fully conscious placement of oneself in the center of this panorama. The senior curriculum serves both purposes by offering subjects that synthesize many themes -- world history, architecture, Faust -- and relate these themes to the centrality of the human being. Additional examples: the students study our relationship to the varied animal kingdoms (zoology) or treat of the great thinkers (e.g., the Transcendentalists) and writers (e.g., the Russian novelists) who have wrestled with the question of our place in the world.

Assignments increasingly call upon the students to pull together, to synthesize, disparate disciplines in an attempt to address the central question of the senior curriculum: Who? Who is this being called Human? And -- who stands behind the outer play of events and natural phenomena, pulling them together into a synthesizing whole?

In this sense, the curriculum of the twelfth grade not only recapitulates the themes of the four years of high school, but also returns to the place where the Waldorf curriculum began in grade 1: with the image of the whole. Now, however, the difference, one hopes, is that the student will truly "know the place for the first time"