I mentioned to someone how I think there should be more hands-on learning in schools and he told me to look up Waldorf schools. Very interesting to say the least. Rudolf Steiner had very unique philosophies, some very weird or outright morally questionable, but some that I think were an appropriate reaction to the “thinking in the box” that is often dolled out in school.
The parts I agree with are that kids are taught engagement with crafts (eg, carving), music and creativity, an inquisitive exploration (reminds me of the Socratic approach), and an adaptive progression of subject matter that is based on the students’ individual levels. It reminds me a lot of the origins of the liberal arts being the skills a free person needed to engage the world, which included music and logic/rhetoric.
The parts I don’t really agree with are the pseudo-spirituality, the pseudo-science, and the racist parts of Steiner’s theory. I think I would need to do a thorough investigation of the specific school before I would consider sending my student there, but the philosophy definitely seems to meet some needs of students that are otherwise under-developed in the current school systems.
What are your thoughts?
The con for me is that each individual school interprets the concept in their own way with no oversight. The one I was looking into for my kid many years ago was so strict with their rules it was scary. We did a trial day with my kid and we were instructed to not eat anything in the morning because breakfast is a very important part of the start of the day.
Breakfast prep with all the serving, singing and saying gratitudes took almost an hour, for a bunch of very small kids some of which had to get up at 5 am so that they could make it to school on time. It was excruciating to watch and they were clearly very hungry.
This ceremony approach continued through the rest of the day, with every little thing taking a lot of time and every kid was expected to religiously play along. It was enough for me to nope out and I didn’t look into it anymore.
Knew someone who went to a Waldorf school. Luckily, she was extremely eager to learn, even as a child, so she finished it with great “grades”
Except for math, which she hated. So she finished her basic education with the math skills of a second grader
I went to one of these as a kid, from first to seventh grade. From what I remember the ideology isnt really taught to the kids, the weirdest things I recall are having to learn writing cursive or drawing/painting in a specific way, and eurythmics class. The latter is a sort of expressionist new age dance/PE hybrid where we did various activities like learning to juggle.
I also learned two second languages right from the first grade, namely english and russian (the latter i mostly forgot over the years due to lack of practice). This i would consider the greatest advantage of this model of schooling, I have retained excellent language abilities with very little effort and always was by default ahead of what was taught at the regular schools I went to afterwards. I also learned to play instruments, sculpting, working with wood and metal, tailoring, and a bunch of other interesting things not taught at regular schools.
Overall I would say it had a positive effect on myself, I only switched schools because I had social issues setting in with puberty.
I’m an outsider “looking in”, so to say, as in I met quite a few people attending a local Waldorf-School near where I went to school. I always felt a lot of them were a little out of touch with the real world, not quite prepared for how things are outside. Very sheltered and… For lack of a better word, dreamy? It felt like they hadn’t learned some of the fundamentals of science but focused a lot on soft stuff instead.
It’s hard to put into words since those are impressions of a pretty judgemental teenager x) and stored in a different language than English since my english back then was still pretty bad.
But their education seemed to lack real preparation for anything but social sciences. It’s been a while, though, maybe it has changed by now.
Guess the math level are not even worst than general population.
worst
Or worse, even.
I went to a Waldorf-Kindergarden and while it was okay mostly (except for some weird stuff like having no black crayons and not being allowed to leave white parts in paintings - or being left-handed, that was fun!) I would never ever recommend it to anyone, solely on the basics that it’s basically an ideology not unlike conspiracy-myths/religions. Even if you don’t realise it as a pupil I think it’s very dangerous - especially in today’s ai-fucked, post-truth climate - to grow up / learn in an institution that is basically anti-science (since is based on random shit* some racist dude made up a hundred years ago).
*Can’t really remember but there are some weird theories about children’s mental development that are super out of date and mean that children aren’t allowed to learn stuff they’re super interested in because “they’re not ready yet”. Not a place I would want to sent anyone.
Huh, that’s interesting that it was around the same time period. It also sounds similar, minus some of the mysticism and anti-science and more anti-government. I wonder if those students had better experiences. Again, I’m sure it depends on the specific instructors and leadership members at the location, since the curriculum is not centralized. I have to wonder if this could be an advantage to having more emphasis on the topics important to that community/region, as opposed to a generalized education curriculum.
Wait, is this real? Is our concept of a modern school built on a movement based in Anarchy, Libertarianism, and rationalism?
Quite the rabbit hole here…
Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader, ed: Mark Bray & Robert H. Haworth (PM Press, 2018)
They go to a Waldorf school in Bluey
As mentioned before every school has a great deal of freedom on how they interpret Steiner and how much of his teachings they use. Almost all of the Waldorfschools I visited went very light on spiritual and pseudo science part. The racism part of Steiners works played no part at all.
I spent over 10 years in and around this community without ever reading a single one of Steiners books and neither did most of the people I met there.
All in all it is just a network that brings a bunch of interesting and sometimes odd people together and then we build lutes and dance poems.
I used to do IT work for one, they were afraid of WiFi, no joke…
