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.