For Choice in Education

Broad Curriculum and Flexibilty of Mind

The young adolescents now move from the care of the Class Teacher of the last eight years to that of a Class Guardian who takes on their pastoral care, fostering the well-being of each pupil and liaising with the parents.

The Upper School

Sense of Self

The adolescent has reached a stage of development in which the individual sense of self is in the process of emerging with a growing intellect and search for truth. As teenagers mature inwardly, they also grow socially. The teenage years are when adolescents hone their powers of judgement and seek to align their inner ideals with truths they experience in nature and culture. During this period, adolescents crave strong sense impressions, actively test limits, and seek truthful answers to questions of destiny and purpose. They need experiences that exercise their growing intellect, imagination and physical and emotional bodies and expand capacities for personal and social involvement.

Child Development

Waldorf Education builds on child development and the premise that what begins in kindergarten comes to fruition at age 18. The curriculum has been nurturing that development from age five onwards. First, creating an environment where the young child can feel safe and cared for and imitation carries the learning process.

From the beginning of the class teacher years, the child’s development expects the teachers to accommodate their need for love and learning to love - during these years, the emphasis moves from imitation to helping them form sustainable habits, embedding capacities for memory and learning while keeping imagination unfettered.

Tolerance and Love

The third phase of development enables the child (from 14 years), the young person by then (we probably would not have considered calling a child up to this age a person) to manifest faculties relating to the world around in a contemplative, conscientious and creative way. They would look for respect, trust and interest from parents, teachers and class members; they would express and practise towards others similar qualities, and possibly most importantly, would become able to show love. Tolerance towards others is a chief outcome of the turmoils of adolescence, and the faculty of judgement is called for.

The last two years of the Waldorf school (Classes Eleven and Twelve), through its curriculum and teaching in the spirit of freedom, affords the pupils to pick the fruits of this education: it is harvest time when we take home the goods of the toil of the preceding years. The last year can be the year of revelation to the pupils of Waldorf in the form of appreciation and understanding of the journey they have experienced.

The Upper School Curriculum

The educational material is brought in a way that students feel challenged intellectually, their feelings are touched, and they have the opportunity to form their own relationship to the content.

Qualifications

To graduate at RWUS, pupils must successfully complete at least 80 credits. Those credits are earned throughout classes 9 to 12. There are around 90 credits available in total over the course of the four years of study in the Upper School.

International Students

It is a great environment to improve your English at your own speed and to help you, we offer EFL (English as a Foreign Language) lessons to all non-native speaker students.

Class Nine - The Year of Polarities

The Class Nine pupil is embarking on the third seven-year phase of human development. Rudolf Steiner once described the feeling life of the teenager at this stage as being “akin to having been ‘spat out’ of the spiritual world.” The emotional life can be in turmoil at this age. The individual is undergoing tremendous changes, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and existentially. Extreme moods are common. Discrepancies between intellectual ability and emotional stability can be experienced. Likewise discrepancies between ideals and action often arise. The Waldorf curriculum seeks to nurture the balanced development of the pupil by meeting the inner soul needs of the individual. Emphasis is placed on the physical aspects of the world.

The Class Nine pupil is encouraged to explore polarities: in Physics the duality of hot and cold is investigated; and the Comedy and Tragedy block is another opportunity to live into polarities. In Black and White Drawing the students practice finding the balance between the dark and the light.

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Class Ten - Towards Balance

Thematically, Class Ten is the year of discovery of transitions and metamorphosis. After experiencing the extremes and polarities of Class Nine, students are prepared to recognize that unity between opposites can be realized if one is conscious of the points of transition. This recognition is made possible by the growing intellect and it is a skill that serves academic and social growth.

The pupils are developing better reasoning skills, as their ability to hold back judgment, listen and observe more carefully grows. Where a Class Nine pupil may cling to unsupported biases and be prone to snap judgments that are hard to shake, the Class Ten pupil thinking is becoming more focused and reflective. This new intellectual power helps them to find balance in the unstable emotional realm of sympathies and antipathies and better able to use logic to analyze that which can be understood through thought.

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Class Eleven - The Power of Analysis

By the end of Class Eleven, the pupils begin to attain objectivity in their feelings and thus increasing capacity to form judgments of taste, style and social tact. They bring mobility into their thinking, which goes beyond the logical causality of their thinking in Class Ten and can now analyse and correlate different factors within a holistic view. They are also able to think about infinite and non-sense-perceptible phenomena. The pupils have a self-directed sense of social responsibility and are able to correlate and integrate related phenomena in a more holistic understanding.

The sense of social responsibility is supported through their study of history, with its examination of personal, community, and national, responsibility and power. The Botany Main Lesson leads students to an understanding of the complex and sophisticated inter-relationships within the plant world, and to see it as a whole, rather than myriad parts. Student progress is evaluated by classroom observation, papers, Main Lesson books, quizzes and tests.

Class Eleven - Community Service Work Experience

The Waldorf curriculum brings the learning and the student into the world. In Class Eleven the curriculum includes an appropriate community service experience to encourage students to develop an understanding toward and willingness to help those who are considered disadvantaged in society (special needs, elderly, homeless, refugees). Pupils usually participate in a three-week-long service, where they continued to grow the love of serving others.

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Class Twelve - The Power of Synthesis

Class Twelve is the culmination of all the experience the pupils have gained in a Waldorf School. At this point in the pupils’ development, they are able to grasp large conceptual ideas. In many ways, we give the pupils a picture of different subjects as a whole experience by exploring the ways in which disparate parts make up the whole. For example, in Zoology, the pupils look at the parts of various organisms and how they make up the whole of the individual animal, and also how the individual animal is part of its own ecological environment, which in turn is part of a worldwide system.

Pupils experience a variety of Main Lesson classes in which they are expected to produce a book or project at the end showing their grasp of the content and concepts presented. Pupils also have skill classes in essential subjects (in Waldorf education this includes the arts), as well as electives to augment individual interests. Quizzes, tests and papers may be forms of assessments for all of these classes depending on the individual teacher. Pupils receive final grades for these classes that are sent home half-yearly and added to their final transcripts.

An Upper School tradition: The Class Twelve Project

The projects range from something practical to an academic research paper. This experience intends to challenge the individual by encouraging the students to discover new perspectives through their passion.
The pupils are required to accomplish this assignment in the last year of their education; relying on their resources, working independently. The work involves a practical element, an extensive written report and a presentation to the school community, exercising their public speaking skills.

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Upper School News

As You Like It, a Class 10 Play

26 January 2024

INTRODUCTORY MORNING

23 January 2024

Class 12 Play – Dress

16 June 2023

Dress, a Class XII play

7 June 2023

Class 12 Project Presentations Review

19 May 2023

CLASS 12 PROJECTS 2023

8 May 2023

End of Term Festival

8 May 2023

Class 12 Project Presentations 2023

4 May 2023

Class 10’s Play ‘Icarus’

29 March 2023

Class 11 Romantic Poetry and Dance

5 March 2023