Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the Navigator, Christopher Columbus, Cortez, Magellan, Pisarro,
or Henry Hudson.
5) Biographies of great figures of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance
are also tempting: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Becket, Saladin, Richard
the Lion-hearted, St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Arc,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Luther, Sir Thomas More, Queen
Elizabeth.
6) Stories portraying an individual’s journey or quest can meet the
eleventh graders well, whatever the setting may be: Hermann Hesse’s
Siddhartha, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth’s
Prelude, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Zora Neale Hurstons’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God.
7) Grade 11 students respond to poetry including any of Shakespeare’s
plays or sonnets, the Metaphysical Poets John Donne, George
Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. The Romantic Poets, Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, especially heal the
separation between mind and matter, between subject and object,
engendered by the scientific revolution, the Age of Reason, and the
Industrial Revolution.
Twelfth Grade
As is true with each grade, one can think of twelfth grade in a number
of ways. Now that the eleventh grader has survived the dangerous,
wondrous journey through the wasteland, the twelfth grader “returns
home,” bringing back to the original society, in this case the whole school
community, the riches of wisdom which the newly emerging individual
has gained on the journey. The twelfth grader can fertilize the wasteland
and give the society new life.
1) Literature about utopias and dystopias can be especially timely for
the senior “world-makers.” Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s
1984, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are all to be recommended.
2) Whereas the ninth grader had jumped into the modern world, the
twelfth grader re-enters the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with
a newly conscious sense of context. The great nineteenth century
novels that shaped modern American consciousness can now be
read with deepened awareness: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Poe’s
stories, Melville’s Moby Dick, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
3) The great nineteenth century Russian novels are also potent at this
stage: Gogol’s Dead Souls. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Dostoyevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov are excellent, as are the
nineteenth century European novels: Hardy’s works, Stendhal’s The
Red and the Black, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
4) Twentieth Century Russian novels that appeal include Zamyatin’s
We, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago,
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