How the Future Can Save Us

“Education prepares us for an unknown, uncertain future. Conformity, convention, and a lack of creative thinking and action will not serve us fully to face this future. We cannot know, and can only guess, what the future will bring, and we educate truly when we educate for inspiration—for insight and creativity—in the face of the unknown. We aim not to define our students, not to pigeonhole them according to our own inevitably partial and too-narrow view of the world they will inhabit and make. We aim to educate them while leaving them free to rebel, not for no reason, but for a reason, for a cause.” —Stephen Sagarin (from the introduction)

In this book, Stephen Sagarin clears away a few cobwebs to reveal the art, the living heart, and profound hope contained in the educational impulse known as Waldorf education. With brisk and insightful essays—written by a man clearly working in the midst of his subject matter—he moves through seven core themes of youth education—growth, method, curriculum, terms, principles, governance, and administration—and ends with a hopeful look at the future.

Employing pithy observations, bold myth-busting insights into key terms (what they mean and do not mean, including “math gnomes”), child development, and much more, How the Future Can Save Us is an engaging and exciting read for both new and experienced teachers, parents and caregivers, and any student of education. It offers a fresh, hopeful, unconventional, and reinvigorating take on Waldorf education—where it comes from, what it means today, and how it still holds promise for the future.