Charles Kovacs

Charles Kovacs (1907–2001) was an Austrian-born Waldorf class teacher whose carefully kept teaching notebooks have become one of the most beloved curriculum resources in the English-speaking Waldorf world. Born in Vienna on 8 February 1907, he emigrated to Britain in 1938 ahead of the Anschluss, joined the British Army in East Africa, and after the Second World War settled permanently in the United Kingdom. There he met his wife Dora through study groups and lectures at Steiner House in London.

In 1956 Charles took over a class at the Rudolf Steiner School of Edinburgh, where he remained a class teacher until his retirement in 1976. Dora taught the Kindergarten at the same school. Across his teaching years he wrote out his daily lessons in notebooks of striking thoroughness, building into his teaching a structure inspired by Steiner’s curriculum that could meet the growing child week by week. He also gave more than three hundred lectures to adults across his lifetime.

After his death, Dora and Floris Books of Edinburgh assembled the notebooks into the curriculum series now in print: Ancient Mythologies, The Age of Discovery, The Age of Revolution, Botany, Geology and Astronomy, The Human Being and the Animal World, Norse Mythology, Parsifal and the Search for the Grail, The Spiritual Background to Christian Festivals, The Apocalypse in Rudolf Steiner’s Lecture Cycle, and others — twenty-three titles in all, translated into Chinese, Korean, and Latvian. Royalties from the books continue to support the Edinburgh Steiner School. For two generations of Waldorf teachers, homeschooling parents, and class mentors, the Kovacs notebooks have been the trusted companion at the planning table.