A stunning example of poetic questioning. Mary Caroline Richards - "M.C." to her friends - attended Reed College (A.B.) and the University of California (M.A., Ph.D.). Her professional life began conventionally enough, as member of the English faculty at California, Central Washington, Chicago, Black Mountain. These assignments brought her face to face with a question: "Why is it we are all so well-educated and brilliant and gifted and artistic and idealistic and distinguished in scholarship, that we are so selfish and scheming ad dishonest and begrudging and impatient and disrespectful of...

For Rudolf Steiner, life can be truly understood only if it is experienced as art is experienced, as inner activities expressed through physical materials. On this ground of the union of inner experience and sensory life, he developed his unique, holistic approach to education. Richards views Steiner schools as expressing a new educational consciousness appropriate for our time, a "grammar of interconnections" among scientific observational, artistic imagination, religious reverence, and practical activity in which every part bears a deep connection.