The Waldorf high school curriculum is designed to be in harmony with the development of the students as they move through adolescence and into early adulthood. Particularly in the morning main lesson blocks, each year is built a central theme or question appropriate to the age of the students engaging the material.

In 9th grade, the curriculum mirrors the struggle of opposition that the students feel within themselves. In physics, for instance, they study the opposition of heat and cold; in chemistry, the expansion and contraction of gases; in history, the conflicts and revolutions of France, Russia, and the U.S.; in geography, the collision of plate tectonics; in literature, comedy and tragedy.

In 10th grade, students begin to seek a certain order in this confusion. The curriculum presents models of balance: acids and bases in chemistry, the principles of mechanics in physics, the self-regulating processes of weather patterns in earth science, the play of masculine and feminine influences in embryology, and the reciprocal relationships of guest and host in The Odyssey. The 10th grade students are called to exercise powers of comparison, weighing in the balance contrary phenomena to determine their value and significance.

The curriculum for the 11^th grade allows the students to cut free of the dimensions of the classroom to embrace the furthest reaches of their own imagination and interests. In a way, the junior year curriculum could be characterized by the theme of invisibility, by the study of those subjects that draw the student into areas not accessible to the experience of our senses. In chemistry, the students enter the invisible kingdom of the atom; in physics, they explore the invisible world of electricity; in projective geometry, they follow parallel lines to the point they share in the infinite - a point which can be thought even though it cannot be seen. In literature they travel the inward journey from sin through purgation to virtue in Dante’s Divine Comedy and confront the inward challenges of transforming selfish folly to compassion, sympathy to devotion, and ardor to faith in the medieval myth of Parzival.

In 12th year, students return to the place where the Waldorf curriculum begins in first grade: with the image of the whole. However, after having been through the different levels and climbing the “12-year staircase,” the student will truly “know the place for the first time.” The senior curriculum serves both purposes by offering a curriculum that synthesize subjects - world history, architecture, Faust - and relate these themes to the centrality of the human being.