Waldorf education is a pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The Waldorf approach emphasizes the role of the imagination, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The overarching goals of this educational approach are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, moral and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.

The first Waldorf school was founded in 1919 to serve the children of employees at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. As of 2009 there were 994 independent Waldorf schools located in sixty countries throughout the world; as of 2001 there were 1400 kindergartens, 120 institutions for special education, and 68 social and teacher training institutions world-wide. There are also Waldorf-based public and Charter schools, homeschooling environments, and Waldorf ideas are being taken up, often less in whole than in part, by an expanding number of American public and private schools today.

The educational approach is known in some countries as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education.