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I feel I have some perspective on this issue. I'm an educator seeped in eduation research, psychology and cognitive science, a PhD physicist and definitely NOT a follower of Rudolf Steiner. However, I have been involved in Waldorf education for ten years, as a parent and for a while as a high school teacher and have gone through two summers of Waldorf high school teacher training and so am well aware how very strange many of Steiner's ideas are. I also continue to spend considerable sums of tuition to keep my three children enrolled in Waldorf school, and continue to be awed by the character and abilities of the young men and women who graduate from our local Waldorf high school each year. Now, I realize that correlation is not causality, and these graduates benefit from many healthy contributing factors including strong familiy and community support that we could only wish for all children. My observations and background, however have led me to think hard about what it is that I value so much about Waldorf schools despite my rejection of their underlying religious/philosophical basis, anthroposophy. My tentative conclusion is that there is an emotional intelligence built into the design and principles of Waldorf education, that was stumbled on intuitively by Steiner and the teachers who concretely interpreted his mix intuitive pronouncement, philosophy and mystical "quackery." The other major factor, held to to different degrees in different places, are the limits Waldorf schools request parents to enforce on the exposure of children to media. That is a night and day kind of issue, visible even in the differences between children of families who enforce those limits and those who don't. Steiner was a strange man, with a few perceptual oddities, perhaps seeing emotions in terms of colors in the way that some people percieve number as color. He grew up with uncanny perceptions and odd blindnesses. Although many in Waldorf education think of him as a scientist, and he was knowledgable of scientific discoveries of his time, however he was at best a philosopher and later a mystic convinced that meditation was a valid way of revealing "truth". Many skeptical, intelligent well meaning people have been led along this track finding that following the same patterns of meditation they too can discover the same "truth" and thus becoming "converts." His later "occult" works were very hard to stomach as required reading for an aetheist, scientist. Waldorf education is something like a sausage, you don't want to look to closely at it guts. However, the intuitive insights and principles that led to and shaped Waldorf education were set much earlier in Steiner's career through the concrete experience of working one-on-one for years with a cognitively/emotionally handicapped young man. Also, Steiner laid down the law that the mysticism of anthroposophy should not intrude in a direct way into the classroom. So parents like myself can enjoy the benefits of this form of education for our children without feeling overly concerned by the mystical beliefs of some of their teachers. I found that few Waldorf educators are turned toward understanding what makes Waldorf eduaction work in terms outside its original intuitive Steiner dictated conceptions. From what I have observed of the curriculum, through multiple lenses, there is lots of concrete preparation for later conceptual development built into the work of the lower grades. In particular, the repeated exercise of "form drawing", highly geometrical figures drawn by hand and sometimes from memory, builds concretely a sensitive awareness of symmetry, whole/part relations, number and proportion. The artistic movement exercise of "euryhthmy" also builds concretely similar spatial awareness, as student move relative to each other in increasingly complex geometrical forms. So the Waldorf curriculum in the lower grades includes some rich and unique concrete preparation and does no harm by expecting reasoning that students are not cognitively prepared to do. In the middle school years however some of that promise is lost as in the area of math many teachers drill students in their multiplication facts and ability to remember the memorized sequence of steps for long division, and perhaps miss a window for cognitive acceleration toward more formal reasoning in the middle school years, but so do most schools and curricula and unlike most a love of learning, intellectual and artistic work and challenge tends to stay intact until Waldorf students pick up more conceptually challenging work in the high school. As I said in my introduction my current hypothesis is that the main benefit of Waldorf education is the emotional intelligence of its design, which I would refine to include delaying many academic expectations, in ways that build up desire and interest until students are emotionally and intellectually prepared to take hold of those challenges. However, there are many other aspects that underlie my labeling Waldorf education as "emotionally intelligent," and I could go on sharing my observations and speculations on that topic for a while. There are aspects of the high school pedagogy that could perhaps support the development of formal reasoning. It might be an interesting case study to try to determine whether it is actually effective in that regard. I don't know of any empirical data to support that it is. I don't know that anyone has given any tests of formal reasoning to Waldorf graduates that would allow for any comparison.