The articles in this book, written by authors from various continents, including university scholars and Waldorf educators, encourage readers to learn to recognize the uniqueness of every child and every adolescent and to discover their own pedagogical creativity. “What is valuable is always under threat. At present, this threat is directed both at the place of education and at the meaning of what it means to be human. Resistance is needed to defend this essence against the homogenizing forces that blur it.”' The words of the Catalan philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol are fundamental to the contributions in this volume. These texts, drawn from the work of the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum, address, on the one hand, the image and meaning of the human: How I understand the human being will have consequences for my educational practice. On the other hand, they address the “place of education”—schools and kindergartens—and their diversity. For every age group, indeed for every child, we as teachers and educators are called upon to open up unique and, in each case, very different paths of learning through “observing recognition.”
