STEINER WALDORF SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS

[theantignome]

hi everyone, i wanted to start a new thread with a NEW topic heading here, as the active one at the moment with over 700 posts looks like it is all about the Cambridge school. This may confuse newcomers.

Let's continue the debate here !
All newcomers welcome !

I will shortly link our two previous threads on MN for any one new to have a look at.

Davy, could you also give a link to your new yahoo list here please ? Thanks.

We have a little - or rather big, actually - Steiner enclave in a village called Järna, south of Stockholm, and it's located in the municipality of a somewhat larger town. Järna is cluttered with anthro business. Anthroposophists are the 2nd largest employer in that municipality, second after the municipality itself (which of course is a large employer - schools, social services etc). There actually are conflicts between the anthros and the rest of the population, especially in Järna. I would think that the whole situation, with the village being so totally dominated by anthroposophy, the market value of the property decreases. Non-anthros would hesitate to move there, understandably. I don't think families with children would like to move there, for example, since with whom would the children socialize without being subjected to the judging of the other parents and the children who've inherited their parents value system?

Faceless expensive woolly doll? Check!
Silk scarves? Check!
Wooden toys, oiled with rounded off corners? Check!
Beeswax? Check!
Dusty gnomes? Check!
Wonky handmade child's cooker? Check!
Ugly felt slippers? Check!

Should I wear an apron and scrape my hair back for viewings? Or should i wear clothes aswell?

I could cut some of my dp's hair and stick on an antho beard.........I could do the same with my dc's or is that too much?

I forgot to add one of the parents asked me to cover the tv once, when one of their children accidently made their own free choice and played with mine and came into our home. It wasn't enough that it an old tiny one we use for videos. Evil is evil!

Oh dear I'll be so glad when this is all over

Zzooey - l guess there are some families in Jarna going through the same. All this must sound utterly bonkers to people who haven't had the experience of being on the wrong side of anthropollioscophy.

Deffo an apron and hair in a bun if poss. or long, grey and straggly. Floaty, brightly-coloured (tie-dyed?)clothes of silk and wool. No black, no logos, no make-up. The aroma of herbal tea and a worthy cake baking. Steinertastic table-top books and some lyre music playing gently.

Display all the lovely craft items your children have made down the years. Speak in a soft voice and gently sing when the mood takes you.

Ahriman lives in all electronic devices - old ones too, you see. In fact, he's been living there for longer Just for videos - well, that's a second electronic device right there. Double evil

You're onto something with the clothes. You know these clothes that are coloured with natural colours, like organic potions or whatever it is, made from flowers and such stuff.

Conceal everything that looks to bright, modern or plastic

Yes got some floaty tie-dye things, lots of layers to help the little souls incarnate...

I just need to work on my voice. This too has been corrected by a concerned steiner neighbour who told me I was talking with my throat instead of my diaphragm.
And there's me thinking man was going to birth the next epoch from his mouth - you just can't win.

I also need to work on my steiner stare. There is no mumsnet expression for this one. We need a combination of [anger] and

Just a short reminder for newcomers in this strange thread of what Waldorf education is about.

hello all, new name for me (i like to express all parts of my life and personality variously though my nom de plumes).

we went to a stiener open day recently. of course, there was no mention of karma in the classroom, reincarnation being a method of academic evaluation, etc. In theory, it's great. But I watched all the kindergarten children as they were being picked up by their parents. NOT ONE of them was smiling, which really worried me. In fact, a good few of the 10 or so I managed to observe looked quite disturbed.

None of the older children I bumped into on my travels around the school on the open day looked happy, either. And they all seemed very self conscious.

We went to an event at steiner house recently and my dp remarked he'd never seen so much knitwear in one room! To him that's a turn off, although to me, it's an attractant!

In short, although it sounded great in theory, the theory and what we could see of the practise (in the kids we managed to catch sight of) didn't seem to add up. We wanted more info, and you lot have amply provided it. Thank you. We WON'T be accepting any place if it is offered to our child. We like him happy.

Barking, in terms of the stiener face, my dp described it as a 'beautific "Look at me, I'm so serene"' semi-smile, not to a person, but to the room when they were aware of being looked at.

Sounds to me like it's an organisation for people who have got big emotional problems (welcome to the club of being human!), but need to feel they've found the answers, and that "I'm allright, Jack".

Good luck with your escape.

"new name for me"

New name for whom?

Hi Kneedeepinthedirtylaundry
Yes in theory it's great. If only they would remove all the weirdness ie. the reincarnation, karma, the anthroposophy it would be a very real alternative. We didn't have the net when we embarked on our steiner journey, I had a copy of 'Freedom to Learn' and 'You are your Child's First Teacher'. I thought I had found the holy grail. I couldn't stop talking about it, why didn't everyone else 'wake up' to steiner education?

I too was attracted to the aesthetics of the place. It really knocks the senses with the great outdoors, the nature tables, beeswax, woodburner, breadmaking etc.
But after my experiences I realised that steiner didn't invent nature, I can still bake bread, go for walks, make dens etc. for free. I had given all my power, time and money to this place.

When I was struggling about whether we should stay or go, I got my dp to take my dc1 there to see if he could make sense of the place, and like you he observed there was no laughter, it was utterly humourless and terribly serious. What a weight on those little shoulders.

We left and thank god we did. After the steiner teacher saying it could take at least a year for her to settle into her new steiner school, it took her approx. 30 seconds in her state primary.

Another thing you mentioned about the disturbed behaviour - a friend of mine who is head of mental health services had to visit our local steiner school recently and he said that many of the children there were exhibiting disturbing behaviour.

A lucky escape.

Barking, I think the idea is that you speak as if you were passing away or seeing a ghost or a murderer approaching with a blood-dripping knife. Or giving birth to Rudolf through your mouth. Choke choke, panic. Hard to speak with the mouth when it's occupied. Almost like being at the dentist's, and trying to communicating he's got to stop dentisting in your mouth because you've got to breath. Can't use the mouth, really.

my dp described it as a 'beautific "Look at me, I'm so serene"' semi-smile, not to a person, but to the room when they were aware of being looked at.

Kneedeepindirtylaudry - Exactly

Also known as steineritis or the waldorf daze, a dreamy, yet intense knowing stare while simultaneously being in another world.

As I keep reading about the 800 - 950 steiner/waldorf schools around the world, I would like to know if all the schools have a large german presence. I just wondered given their missionary zeal, are they told to set one up in each country?

Zooey:

No place among the good race for me

I see the sign on your forehead already

Oh dear! a sign so visible it can be seen from across the Atlantic ocean! It almost surpasses the myth of the Chinese wall being visible from the moon

Zzooey living here is rather like living through root canal work.

I'm rather good at accents maybe I could work on my steiner 'speech formation' slow deliberate germanic with a slight american twist...........

Thank you so much for cheering me up today. I really appreciate this, it reminds me that I'm not alone and I'm not going mad. Nearly. But not quite.

Sune:

"Just a short reminder for newcomers in this strange thread of what Waldorf education is about."

Ya know, Sune, it looks to me like the mums here do know what Waldorf education is about.

Just some few words nn the small, fringe anti-waldorf hate type of group, that Alicia AKA ZZoey, who now sits on its board since some time, recommends as "information" about waldorf education:

At first glance PLANS appears to be raising thoughtful, well-founded and well-formulated objections against Waldorf education.

Anyone with some background in or experience of Waldorf education will, however, soon realize that most of the material posted on the PLANS web site contains numerous inaccuracies and distortions, some subtle, some obvious.

PLANS' statements on their web site and in online discussions on the "Waldorf Critics" mailing list, owned by the secretary of the group, are seriously distorted and are not supported by the published research on Waldorf education.

PLANS also cultivates and publishes a number of myths defamatory even to the point of demonization about Waldorf education, plus a number of demonstrably untrue allegations about Waldorf education and anthroposophy (the spiritual philosophical basis of Waldorf education), and Rudolf Steiner, the founder of both.

The publication by PLANS includes valid criticism, but it is also filled with defamatory exaggeration, distortion, and delusion about Waldorf education, about its founder Rudolf Steiner, and about anthroposophy, the philosophical approach from which Waldorf's view of education of the developing child derives. PLANS' Internet campaign is in many ways an extension of the long-term personal philosophical crusade of one of its founders to compel education, the sciences, medicine, and related pursuits to conform to strictly secularist/skeptic principles.

Investigation also shows that PLANS relied on false allegations of witchcraft teachings in order to raise funds to litigate their case against the two public Waldorf-methods schools.

Good one.

For the german touch, you could always substitute the usual "yes" for a prolonged "jaaaaaaaaaaa" preferably with increasing shrillness and near choking on the last aa!

INTERNET JUDGMENT OF "PLANS INC."

In 2001, a meta editor at the large search portal DMOZ, Open Directory Project, decided, after reviewing the PLANS web site, to remove it from the "Waldorf theory" category at DMOZ. PLANS simply did not qualify as an informational site on Waldorf education as judged by the standards of DMOZ.

Similar judgments of the site have apparently been made by two of the major search engines on the net; Google and Altavista. Both of them have dropped PLANS as an "informational" source on Waldorf education and anthroposophy.

In 2002, Google removed the PLANS site from the "Waldorf organizations" category in its web directory, and Google AdWords canceled an ad from the group.

In 2003, Altavista, after a similar review of the PLANS site, decided to take the drastic step of removing all direct links from its web index. It also notified Overture.com that it did not want to publish the sponsored ads it provided for PLANS.

Overture, notified that Altavista was unwilling to publish these ads, stopped publishing them but then started again when PLANS signed up once more for them. At this point the legal office of Altavista simply refused all ads from Overture for searches on "waldorf", "waldorf education", and "Rudolf Steiner", regardless of their origin, to get rid of the ads for PLANS.

The PLANS site has started to turn up at Altavista again due to the automatic indexing process, but Altavista is not accepting ads from Overture for the searches mentioned above.

As of February 2005, Overture quit publishing ads for the group though they were again published durig the first half of 2006 again by the webmaster of the group.

Good one, ZZoey.

Zooey you are so funny, I'm hysterical over here.

The walk - one of our teachers said that you should always move slowly and thoughtfully, this is healthy for the children, and she advised me to try to walk as if you were walking through water, waist-high.

I went home that night and tried it. I remember moving around the kitchen trying to make dinner, my son in his toddler seat, and I was doing the "walking through water thing" and I was thinking it was going to take all night to get food on the table, and my little boy was was staring at me very alarmed, obviously wondering what was the matter with me. My husband came in and said I should knock it off, it was disturbing

Barking - no, you are not alone nor going mad. What you describe is a journey many others have taken before you, toward extricating yourself and your children and realizing that yes, nature still exists and you can still enjoy it without Steiner-neurosis attached. You can bake bread, you can walk in the woods, you can do arts and crafts; Steiner not required.

A friend on the Waldorf critics list I think coined the term "Waldorf Daze" to describe his family's "days" in Waldorf, but it could equally apply to the stare. Though I also really like the term "Steiner stare," it seems appropriate.

Humor definitely helps - another one that cracks me up - did any of you have children in the grades? Or maybe Zooey, you recall, the official morning handshake? Someone on the survivors list described it as the "Slow down, you're in our control now" handshake.

Eva - go and knit a life will you!

Nice try, Sune. Do you think the mums here are going to fall for this?

This is what I meant by a "ruse," btw. This is your handiwork - and if you were an honest person and not - what term shall we use - how about "con artist"? "liar"? "forger"? "fraud"? - you'd not fail to mention that you arranged all this yourself, rather than posting misleadingly that DMOZ or google decided this after a "review."

They pretty much respond to complaints automatically this way, and getting it reinstated is very bureaucratic.

I'm sure everyone here figured out right away who filed the complaints.

DianaW -

steiner walking through water = swimming through treacle