The Charlottesville Waldorf School builds a foundation that allows children to meet the future with courage, integrity, and a sense of service. CWS exists to offer education based on an anthroposophical understanding of the human being as developed by Rudolf Steiner and as nurtured through the active self-development and child observation of our faculty. We seek to provide the child with the physical environment and stimulation of the imagination needed at each stage of their growth in order to awaken the new capacities required to reach their full adult potential. The grade school program engages students in intensive three-to-four-week studies of themes accompanied by high academic, artistic, and behavior standards that are designed to prepare the child for later demands on his or independent judgment. These main lesson blocks provide students in grades one through eight with academic skills through the study of human culture that follows the awakening of human consciousness through history. 

Our Early Childhood and Grade School programs hold the clear goals of cultivating a reverential attitude toward the world and the capacity to engage the imagination in the world; developing faculties of perception; and strengthening the will to carry out one’s own initiatives, whether through speech, athletics, mathematics, music, scientific discovery, or artistic expression. We see all of this as vital to the healthy development of the child toward adulthood.