Steiner education

[alloveragain]

Can anyone suggest an appropriate forum in which I could talk to someone about Steiner education? We have our concerns about it, but our children are still at a Steiner school.
Thanks

Considering all the very happy parents and hundreds of thounsands of chidren having being educated in Steiner schools and leading their lifes as you and I with some being very sucsessful including achieving celebrity status, I am not sure how else to decribe your digs at our schools.
My own children have now been at our school for 15 years combined, very happy and thriving. Gnomes appear in stories for the very young but who says that anyone beleaves in their existance here on earth other than in stories.
I appreciate that there are families and individuals with bad experiences but that is always a two way process and involves emotions as many of you say, listen to what your heart tells you or go with your feelings/instinct. They may not have had a proper hearing which is not good enough, and we need to learn from that.
They may have been dealing with an inadequate teacher which is not good enough and our schools need and do learn from that.
If you are saying we need to improve in some areas then I would agree with you.

People have criticised our shool system for 90 years yet there are new schools appearing every where, many goverments supporting our schools around the world.

thecaty: are you agreeing that you are a Steiner school teacher?

restlessnative I am a human being, an artist, a house parent, a member of a sailing club, was a student at a university,read the Guardian, have a season ticket for a football club, and like most of what I have seen at the 9 waldorf schools i visited. I have been with Steiner Waldorf for 10 years and know there are human beings involved in them that make mistakes. I hope that is enough.

thecaty so, you might be a teacher? Or possibly a house parent connected to a Steiner school? What is your interpretation, as an interested party, of this article by US Steiner Waldorf teacher Eugene Schwartz?
Anthroposophy and Waldorf Education: The Kindergarten Years
It seems a pretty accurate analysis to me, having read a certain amount of Steiner. But then I'm not the expert.

I'm assuming that a link to an article by a Waldorf Steiner teacher (one still advocating Steiner education & so not critical of it in any way) can't be seen as potentially libelous, even to really sensitive anthroposophists.

The article is fine.

which celebs are steiner educated???

We looked at a Steiner school that was just a bit too far away for it to work. It looked fab and I was really tempted to move closer... reading this thread I feel as though my kids had a lucky escape

I'm interested thecaty that you don't find a problem with my last link. The article by Eugene Schwartz seems remarkably congruent with the concerns northernrefugee has raised on these threads. In other words: she and others are writing about the consequences for real families when teachers believe these anthroposophical ideals, for which there is incidentally no evidence and impose them on children.

It may seem shallow of me to ask for evidence but these are after all extraordinary claims. The presence of 'etheric' and 'astral' bodies would need to be substantiated and not by 'spiritual science' or wishful thinking. This is because attention to the process described is, in my opinion, potentially anti-therapeutic, even abusive. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh. But private fantasies about the development of various imaginary 'forces' shouldn't be indulged at risk to real children, some of whom don't appear, from their parents' descriptions on these threads and elsewhere, to fit the Steiner ideal.

I know thecaty that you don't intend to harm any child. This isn't an attack on you.

stressystressed you could google 'Waldorf School Alumni'. Or wait for the list to fly to you here, which it may do any minute now...

restlessnativeJust tell me how they are imposed on those children, other than in your imagination.
also...
You need to tell me about, the process described, a little more so that I may comment. What process are you talking about?

May I remind you that I know of a few adults that have been educated in Steiner Schools and are just like you and me free thinking thriving adults.
Could you please explain to them, my friends how exactly they have been damaged. I am sure they would love to hear from you and Northern et al. I've got their e-mail addresses so I can copy in your responses.

shockers I am said you are taken in by all the mostly spinless scare mongering. Yes there are seemingly shocking things happening and surely mistakes have been made but you rerally only always hear on side of the story here on this thread. You know as well as I that there is always two sides to any story. How can you form an opinion by hearing one party and not the other?
best wishes for your dc's that incidently would be as little harmed as my friends described in my last post.

I did form an opinion by hearing one party and not the other... as I said, it looked fab. One thing that did put me off was the fact that the school only went as far as age 14 which seemed to me to be a bad time to move schools. They also weren't very enthusiastic about my SEN daughter. I did think my son would have liked it and I loved the way the children were involved in the design and build of playground equipment and the growing and cooking of meals. I wasn't sure about their negative attitude to sport though.
I've now heard another side. I've been to a church in the past that was very exclusive... lot of talk about people from outside the church ( even from nearby churces) not being part of our fellowship and family. Things like that make me uncomfortable. If you're strong enough in your belief then you shouldn't have to worry about being 'diluted' by the opinions of others.
There were some fabulous elements to Steiner education. I'm sure that is why many of the people posting on this thread were interested enough to send their children to Steiner schools.
I do believe that it wouldn't have been a balanced enough education for my son... the physical is just as important to him as the mental and emotional.
It worries me that parents on this thread didn't feel as though they had any control.
I don't believe that parents would "scaremonger" for no reason. They will always want the best for their children first and foremost. Most of the posters who were concerned mentioned happiness... surely that is what every parent wants for their child?

Can I also say that we did move closer to the school that we eventually chose.

shockers I am glad you found the school you were looking for. Many of the posters have been posting for ages and I believe in letting people judge for themselves but if you hear fellow parents using seductively scaring stories then I would not blame them for not even trying.

Physical activity plays a big role in Steiner Schools. My own son in class 5 runs 1.2 kilometers every morning with his class.
He also has a games lesson (his favorite lesson in the whole week) and Friday Lunchbreak they play foot ball. He and his class mates are very fit. They will soon have an extra lesson a week with Javeline, discus and other traditional Olympic sports to train them for the class 5 Olympics in the summer. A wonderful event despite of what the Waldorf critics would say.
I am closely involved at our school and 6 out of 12 families that have left the school in the ten years did not talk to the teachers directly about their concerns but launched formal complaints about petty things that then got blown out of proportion because they were formal complaints and the School takes formal complaints seriously.
Each situation could have easily been resolved. The other six left because the families moved away from the area.
Luckely 45 new families have joined in that time aswell so our school has grown.
I do get fedup with some criticts banging on how damaging our education is when I see how wonderfull it is for my own children every day and when I think of my friends that were Steiner educated. It really feels like an insult on a continous time loop.

shockers Just to let you know one possible explanation the school was not very enthusiastic about your SEN daughter could be that generally in any school state or Steiner you should not go above 1/3 of all children being on SEN unless it is a dedicated SEN class or there was a class assitant in place for SEN children.

There was only dancing available as PE at the school we looked at. My son does a lot of out of school sport but I got the impression that this wasn't encouraged because of the competetive element of sport.
There were apparently no SEN children in the school at all. Her difficulties are also social/emotional ( we adopted her at 3) and this was the reason I was looking at Steiner in the first place... I liked the philosophy and the importance placed on the interaction between adult and child. However, when we actually looked round the school, it seemed more suitable for my son than my daughter. She is now in a special school and has a happy and fulfilled school life with the opportunity to participate in many things she would have been excluded from within mainstream.
All that aside, I still worry about your terminology " seductively scary stories"... why would people do that? Most parents are too busy and too concerned with their children's welfare to spend time concocting stories about thriving, happy schools.
I really think that we should accept that what seems right to one family may not work for another. In a closed community it may not be as easy as you think to make a complaint ( as I found within the church I mentioned).
There also seems to be a big difference in the different Steiner schools. The attitude to sport appears to differ wildly!
I'm glad your family are happy. I loved the school but there were nagging doubts which were clarified when I read this thread. It was perhaps a little flippant to say that we had a lucky escape but I am glad we followed the path we did regarding both my children's education.

They are seductive in the sense that they sound so convincing but if you actually look at each one (story) and find out what really happened on both sides you will often find the language used by the critic OTT.
The problem is they are talking about their 5 year olds being damaged which to any caring parent sounds scary. Non have actually prooved this With a professional medical report. There is not really anything scary about our education. And As I said there are thousands and thousands of graduates to prove this.
You admitted yourself that using the word 'lucky escape' was perhaps a bit flippant. It is really important how we express ourselves.
Especially when talking about children.
As far as sport is concerned it happens at all Steiner Schools the differences are subtle. Football is something most schools alow from class 9 (year ten). Children play it any way at home the one's that are interested from the age of three. So maybe there are activities we regard as more beneficial, skipping, running, (hockey, basketball and others from class 6) Games involving strategy are the childrens favorites.
At the Olympics we play games with 120 children in the same game and they all give it their all.
At our school we also do sailing, canoeing.
Two boys won 2nd prize at a recent Sailing regatta involving 25 schools.
A lot of the games are preparing children for sports for class 4 upwards. this is very similar in all Waldorf Schools around the world.

thecaty not sure if you're saying: 'spineless scare-mongering', can you clarify? It could be a reference to 'spin'.

The ideas described in that unusually honest article by Eugene Shwartz explain the unique pedagogy of the Steiner (Waldorf) kindergarten. It is this pedagogy that is the process: if you don't understand it, thecaty I suggest a little reading. I understand it myself a great deal better than I did when my own children were at a Steiner kindergarten. If the staff had been more honest with us at the time we would have been alarmed, not because they were unkind to our children (they were not) but because there is clearly a potential for exactly the consequences described by posters here and across the web when teachers believe in 'incarnation', spirit worlds and other uberwoo. However well-meaning the teachers, however little they as individuals believe this twaddle, the pedagogy itself is manifest in every aspect of the kindergarten. Having experienced other early years settings just as 'child-centred', welcoming, home-like etc but without the anthroposophy, I believe it just isn't worth the risk of ignoring the Steiner pedagogy and hoping for the best.

A potential for damage is not of course universal damage and many of us feel we've somehow survived our education, it isn't exclusive to any one system. If your friends are interested in how the Steiner pedagogy can manifest negatively they could read the stories on these threads and elsewhere on the web, none of which I can be credited with imagining.

shockers you're right, I'm quoting you: "seductively scary stories"... why would people do that? Most parents are too busy and too concerned with their children's welfare to spend time concocting stories about thriving, happy schools.'

When teachers themselves publicly discredit and belittle parents' experiences as 'OTT' or 'scaremongering' or reply to them with personal insults, it's not surprising that initial poster asked the question 'where can we go to talk about this?'

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Nuf said. you are right my children are more important than talking to a brickwall.

last post was not meant in response to gnomesrus

Was it in response to me?