“I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age."
- Henry David Thoreau
When I was growing up in Cape Town, there was one Waldorf school in town. In those days, it tended to attract kids who had been expelled from other schools or who struggled to fit in but who had sympathetic parents. In the absence of alternative options, it became home to many special needs children and, in a case of cause and effect being confused, it thus developed a reputation for producing "difficult" and "undisciplined" students. One of my mother's friends, who worked at the local university, used to say that "Waldorf" stood for "walled off" as the Waldorf kids she met often seemed distant and detached. In retrospect, I think some of them were probably on the autism spectrum.
Later, when I moved to the UK, I temporarily rented a room in the home of a couple whose daughter attended a Waldorf school. This girl and her friends seemed unusually friendly, socially adept, emotionally intelligent, and anything but "walled off". I guess special needs kids had more options for care in the UK at that time, which meant Waldorf schools were left to attract relatively "mainstream" kids.
From all I have heard and read about Waldorf schools, I find the focus on imagination, kindness, acceptance, and multisensory experience most appealing. Engaging the imagination and the senses through art, physical activity, and a language-rich environment, along with teaching a sense of ethics, are at the core of Waldorf education.
The schoolday at Waldorf usually has three main parts: Head, Heart, and Hands, although the boundaries between each are not always clear. The day starts off with the main lesson, the "Head", which should be imaginatively presented and is usually thematic. It moves on to the "Heart" part, which includes art, drama, movement, music, and foreign langauge, and ends with the "Hands" part, which might include gardening, knitting, or crochet.
When I visited the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, California, I was impressed by how nurturing the teachers were and by the way art, movement, and practical experience were integrated into the curriculum. The kids seemed unusually absorbed and focused, and the classrooms were beautifully decorated by the children's artworks. On the other hand, I was surprised by the degree of conformity in all the artwork. This is a common criticism of Waldorf education, i.e., that student artwork is all so similar, and it raises questions about creativity. However, it was heartening to see children drawing while their teacher explained an aspect of the lesson. Some people seem to learn better if they can draw while they are listening. My husband likes to draw maps while he's listening to a presentation, yet afterwards he usually has almost eidetic memory of everything that was said. I would think illustrating what they are hearing, while being exposed to pretty colors, probably helps children avoid daydreaming.
Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf education, believed there are 12 senses rather than the traditional five. He divided these into three groups of four, each group developmentally related to a particular age cohort. He identified the first group as the physical senses, associated with development in the first seven years of life. These are: life (which allows us to experience our own constitution and sense of wellness), touch, movement, and balance. Then come the senses of "perception" or the "soul senses", which are the focus of development from 7 to 14 years of age. These are: sight (light, darkness, color), smell (related to memory), taste, and warmth (both the physical and the emotional senses of warmth and cold). Then come the cognitive, "concept", or social senses, which are the focus of development from the ages of 14 to 21. These are: hearing, word or speech (awareness of how others use language to communicate), thought (comprehending and visualizing what another's thoughts convey), and ego (the ability to be sensitive to individuality). Waldorf education attempts to engage each of these senses in the development of the person.
When I was growing up, only two senses, used in limited ways, were considered important in the classroom. These were sight (reading from the textbook and from the chalkboard) and hearing (listening to the teacher). We were expected to disengage all other senses and to immobilize ourselves physically. This very sterile environment starved the imagination and the senses, which led many of us to cope by daydreaming. In every year of my schooling, we studied South African history, which to me was stigmatized by the soulless authoritarianism of apartheid, racism, and the classroom environment. South African history went in one ear and out the other, and, despite the endless repetition, I remain abysmally ignorant of the subject. The only little snippet I learned, I learned outside the classroom from reading Jock of the Bushveld, a story about an oxwagon transport rider and his dog Jock, who worked in South Africa in the late 1800s. I can only imagine how much we might have learned if our imaginations and senses had, Waldorf-style, been integrated into our education.
So how effective are Waldorf schools? Several studies indicate many benefits, although it's not clear to what extent socioeconomics (most Waldorf schools are private) play a part in the success of students. Waldorf kids on average score better than state-schooled kids on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Ability. Another study showed that Waldorf students score significantly higher on tests of moral reasoning than students in public and religiously affiliated high schools. Waldorf students tend to be happier and less bored in school and to have better relationsips with their teachers than their public schooled couterparts. Academically, Waldorf students appear quite successful. At public Waldorf schools in the US, children tend to score below average in the earlier grades, but higher by the time they are in middle school. A US study indicated that Waldorf students typically score above average on their SAT tests, particularly on the verbal parts of the test. This is in spite of their relative lack of experience in taking standardized tests. A German study showed that Waldorf graduates passed the German college entrance exams at double to triple the rate of graduates from state schools. A 2009 PISA study found European Waldorf students to be significantly more advanced in the sciences, slightly behind in math, and comparable in reading when compared to their state school peers.
Not everyone believes Waldorf education is effective. Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, looking for a school where his four children would be allowed some individuality, as opposed to being put through sausage machines or reduced to becoming "another brick in the wall", sent them all to Michael Hall, a Waldorf School in East Sussex. He felt they received dismal educations and were "neither happy nor learning." His son Matthew could barely read at nine. In 1994, when Matthew was about eight, his IQ tested at 101 and he was found to be delayed by three years in reading and spelling. He was taken out of the Waldorf system and apparently flourished. Less than two years later, his IQ tested as 124. Of course, IQ testing is an imperfect art and Waldorf students, like "unschooled" students, often do better relative to the norm as they get older, but Gilmour was unimpressed.
Had we moved to Boulder, instead of central Colorado, I would definitely have taken a look at the Tara Performing Arts High School, a Waldorf school with an emphasis on theatre, music, and travel. Like its fellow Waldorf high school in Boulder, Shining Mountain, it offers Waldorf "main lessons" as well as relatively traditional "track classes" in foreign languages, math, language arts, etc. Students from both schools apparently average 29 on their ACT's. In the case of Shining Mountain, 98% of them end up graduating from four-year colleges and 37% complete graduate school. Tara does not provide these sort of statistics, but it lists some impressive colleges and universities that its students have attended. Graduates of both schools often matriculate to good liberal arts colleges.
There seem to be many positive aspects of Waldorf education, some of which I have tried to include in my kids' home schooling curriculum. When they were little, I tried to incorporate sensory experience and movement/balancing activities into their lives, although we did not embrace the Waldorf rejection of technology for our children (mine watched videos, played computer games, and had electronic toys). They loved to play outdoors. I would put out flours of different textures in bowls in the backyard for them to play with. They had a sandbox, a small pool, and two climbing structures, one of which Craig built. We had an electric train they could ride on, battery powered cars and a go-cart, and several ride-on toys, such as push toys and tricycles. We had lots of play dough and there was always a plastic easel and paints set up for them. We read together, and they had lots of unstructured time for imaginative games. One of the phrases I remember them using from those days was "in the game ..." as they described their imaginary worlds. They also built and created with Brio train sets, Lego, and other construction materials. As they got older, some of them used the k12 virtual curriculum, which is thematic and incorporates a great deal of art and literature. It is a "playful" curriculum, and, in that respect, Waldorf-esque. The girls took a number of theater classes (drama, dance, musical theater, singing). All four kids studied piano and at least one other instrument, voice (in some cases, just choir; in others, individual voice lessons), and, at some point in their lives, played in a youth orchestra. As they got older still, they found their way into more formal and traditional curricula, but, being home/online schooled, school never dominated their lives in terms of time or importance and left them free to indulge in reading, art, music, technical projects, physical activity, and unstructured learning.
In some ways we neglected rote learning, such as memorizing multiplication tables, in favor of less structured activity. Perhaps I should have been more forceful, organized, and traditional. On the other hand, they seem to be doing fine, and, as is predicted by both Waldorf and unschooling methods of education, they seem to be gathering educational momentum as they get older.
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