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?
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.
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.
