The Essence of Waldorf Education - Softcover

In this passionate, inspiring, and moving book, Peter Selg, speaking out of a deep knowledge of Anthroposophy and extensive experience as a child psychiatrist, goes back to the original impulses underlying the first Waldorf School to show their continuing validity and how they still respond to what we need today.

From this point of view, Waldorf education is future-oriented, based on a holistic worldview that is simultaneously humanistic, scientific, and spiritual, and unfolds through a developmental curriculum and a teacher-student relationship based in love.

Through this story of the first Waldorf School we learn to see Waldorf Education in a new way: in its essence, as a healing model of what education might become if the primary relationship, the inner core of a school, is the free relationship between teacher and student.

Peter Selg was born in 1963 in Stuttgart and studied medicine in Witten-Herdecke, Zurich, and Berlin. Until 2000, he worked as the head physician of the juvenile psychiatry department of Herdecke Hospital in Germany. Peter selg is now director of the Ita Wegman Institute for Basic Research into Anthroposophy (Arlesheim, Switzerland) and professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences (Germany). He lectures extensively and is the author of numerous books, including Rudolf Steiner as a Spiritual teacher, The Therapeutic Eye, and A Grand Metamorphosis. He is married with five children.