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?
As mentioned before every school has a great deal of freedom on how they interpret Steiner and how much of his teachings they use. Almost all of the Waldorfschools I visited went very light on spiritual and pseudo science part. The racism part of Steiners works played no part at all.
I spent over 10 years in and around this community without ever reading a single one of Steiners books and neither did most of the people I met there.
All in all it is just a network that brings a bunch of interesting and sometimes odd people together and then we build lutes and dance poems.