Pedagogical Application of the Seventh-day Adventist Philosophy of Education

The impetus for this paper is an article that appeared in the Sep-tember 1999 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The title of that article, writ-ten by Todd Oppenheimer, is “Schooling the Imagination. ” Oppenheimer describes a particular school system that educates not only the mind to think, but also one that treats the body and the soul as an integrated whole. This system, called the Waldorf Schools, is based on the philosophy of its founder, Rudolf Steiner. Steiner, a philosopher and scientist born in Austria in 1861, called his theory “anthroposophy, ” which is a belief “about the evolution of human consciousness drawn from a multiplicity of disciplines— anthropology, philosophy, psychology, science, and various religions, par-ticularly Christianity ” (Oppenheimer, 1999, p. 30). In the Waldorf Schools, every act, every piece of curriculum, every discussion of every aspect of life is tied back to the basic philosophy. In the Waldorf Schools, the philoso-phy drives the pedagogy, and the Waldorf teacher practices the philosophy, down to a level of incredibly minute detail. Today, the Waldorf school sys