I was going to write "dominate" but thought I'd go for a little something different :)

By the way, I hope I didn't sound like a believer in standardized tests. As far as I'm concerned they're for meat-packing plants. The fact that our schools are child-processing factories is a shame (probably the single thing I'd change about our society if I could). All I meant was that Waldorf schools would be a lot more vulnerable to mainstream condemnation if their kids didn't out-perform on those tests. You can't respond to criticism by saying, "just look at these children, they're happy and grounded". But you can sure say, "what part of the 99th percentile do you have a problem with"?

Where my sister-in-law teaches, their results are at the top of our province (Alberta), which itself has a reputation for having one of the best school systems in the world. We're usually compared to Finland in this respect - which scares me, because the truth is that our schools suck, so it's an indication of how bad things are elsewhere.

No, they learn how to look at context to determine what words mean in a given situation.