Internationally, 9 to 10 years of compulsory education is required in most countries, starting from age 5 or 6.  One notable exception is Germany, however, where homeschooling is illegal (and has been since 1930).  This is somewhat ironic, since Germany is the homeland of Rudolph Steiner and Waldorf Education, a very grass roots age-appropriate approach to education which a strong emphasis on the arts.  There is also a movement in the US towards unschooling and natural learning, which is a curriculum-free philosophy, coined in 1977 by American educator and author John Holt in his magazine Growing Without Schooling.  These approaches are more of a “learn by doing” approach which integrates real life into child experiences rather than using textbooks as a basis for education.

Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute explains why US homeschooling families now include more than 1.4 million children. Ray reports the typical homeschooled child is involved in 5.2 social activities outside the home each week. These activities include afternoon and weekend programs with conventionally (typically publicly) schooled kids, such as ballet classes, Little League teams, Scout troops, church groups and neighbourhood play.  And with respect to book learning, homeschoolers, on average, score 30 to 37 percentile points higher than conventionally schooled students on the most commonly administered K-8 standardized tests.

Homeschooled children are much less preoccuppied with peer dependence.  Emotionally, homeschooled children tend to draw their main social identity from their membership in their family rather than from their peers.  And as Gordon Neufeld reinforces in his book, “Hold Onto Your Kids.” his 35 years of child development experience (plus 5 kids of his own) point out  ”Why Parents Matter More than Peers”.  His book explores the pivotal importance of children’s relationships to those responsible for them.  Neufeld  highlights how devastating child’s lives can become when they get their teachings from peers rather than parents or adult role-models. His book also confronts such relationship devastating devices as time-outs and using what children care about against them. Neufeld essentially offers an attachment parenting perspective, offering strategies for preserving and restoring the child-to-parent relationship.  Home-schooling can really help foster strong parent to child bonds.

David Guterson talks about the issues around peer dependence in his book, “Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense,” (Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich, 1992). Guterson reports that the kids in his conventional school often have difficulty navigating the turbulent social scene at school, with “its cliques, rumors and relentless gossip, its shifting alliances and expedient betrayals.” Guterson says that their preoccupation with peer acceptance often encourages young people to become “acutely attuned to a pre-adult commercial culture that usurps their attention (M-TV, Nintendo, fashion magazines, teen cinema)” and frequently fosters a sense of alienation from people of other ages.  Many parents of “distant” or “aloof” teens often wonder what they’ve done to deserve this treatment.  Children who receive home education don’t get a chance to sever this important bond with their parents.

I see elements of peer-influenced mass media when my kids interact with others in the playground. When another child talks about the latest Disney or shoot-em-up action hero movie, my kids are often caught off guard.  Being a no-screen family, my kids listen with mouths open as other children describe the various violent scenes that their adult action hero has making mince-meat of whatever villian they are facing.  I am happy to shelter my kids from this kind of school-yard discussion of passively absorbed media.  I have a friend who’s child’s play was changed forever after watching Star Wars. Some families take young (age 5 and under) children to movie theatres where they are blasted with wall sized ads, violent cartoon scenarios and general over-stimulation. Any child development specialist will tell you that child brains simply can’t handle this at a young age.  Simplicity Parenting founder Kim Payne highlights the emotional similarities between media ravaged kids and children raised in from war-torn third world countries.  He also points out a direct correlation between children diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and their hours spent in front of “the box”.  It’s sad to hear school yard banter talking about gossiping characters in the latest reality TV series vs what they actually did themselves last weekend.

Educational researcher Susannah Sheffer of Cambridge, Mass., says facilitating peer-dependency is part of “how schools shortchange girls”. In a recent study of self-esteem among adolescent girls, Sheffer found that unlike their conventionally schooled counterparts, homeschooled girls did not typically lose confidence in themselves when their ideas and opinions weren’t embraced by their friends. And we know that it’s not just self-esteem, but an increasing importance on self-compassion which makes girls and boys more emotionally confident and mature.

Learning at home never stops.  Not only can it be tailored to the individual child (vs a classroom of 30+ kids), but it can mostly happen outside the classroom.  There is also more time to study subjects in depth, without the worry of a bell ringing (Pavlov’s Dog anyone?) or lunch arbitrarily stopping a lesson exactly at noon.  Homeschooling strengthens the most important bond of all, the family bond.  Interestingly, 30% of homeschoolers in the US do so because of religious reasons.  I found this shocking, maybe just being Canadian, but it does make the point that many parents want to share their own personal, spiritual or religious beliefs with their children, and not have them be force fed someone else’s ideals.

Homeschooling means also that children are not just exposed to others their exact same age, but are also integrated with younger and older children and elders constantly.  From a health perspective, being in a low stress environment with home-cooked meals is much more desirable to many families.  And most importantly I think, is the ability for children to engage creatively in their own play.  Free and active play has always been heralded to being key in any healthy child.  They need time to digest their own learnings, experiment, pretend and be creative on their own time.  Many feel that this play is when the true learning occurs, and what better setting for that to be than in their own home.

The red flags for parents considering Waldorf are often things like, no reading before age 8 or 9.  There’s no media in the classroom (e.g. logos/ads on shirts etc) or TV allowed, competitive sports only at older ages and only as an extra-curricular activity. Standardized testing is replaced with individual creative learning. Emphasis is on storytelling, art, music, dance,  fairy tales and medieval stories.  I’ve often  heard parents dismiss this approach as “flakey” or “too soft for my children” or “too coddling” or “over-protective”.  In fact, that is exactly the point.  We are exposing our children to too many adult ideas and concepts of which young brains simply cannot process. And although Waldorf is a paid private system, most if not all offer heavily subsidized tution plans to ensure that they are not an elitist option.

So, why Waldorf then?  Here’s why;

1) Age Appropriate Learning

Waldorf divides childhood development into thirds.  There is the birth to age 7 portion where children are driven by imitation of their teachers and parents.  School is considered an extension of their family, where the same teacher follows children through each stage (grade) of education, as do parents.  Spoken stories and fairytales are the focus for language development, as well as imaginative play, seasonal festivals and natural outdoor toys and influences. Hands-on crafts using wood, wool, needle-felting and knitting emphasize young children’s focus on motor skills vs desk work.

Learning to read or write, math and media are not included in this stage of development, as they are thought not to be age appropriate. Brain development experts in early childhood education would agree, especially since the left and right brain hemisphere remain largely unattached until the end of this development stage.  In fact, writing is introduced before reading as more of an artform rather than an exercise in decoding words.  This is diametrically opposed to the public system of pushing reading and writing heavily in early grades.  Music and dance is required and every student learns to play the recorder early on and then a string instrument at a slightly later age.  Children learn science from nature and hands-on experiments rather than from textbooks.  In Waldorf, spoken word storytelling is central to their academic work, taking the place of glossy picture books and even videos in the public system.  Creativity expert Ken Robinson maintains that the typical public school system “kills creativity” by focussing too much on outdated curriculum and desk-based learning.

2) Zero Tolerance for Mass Media

Kim John Payne M.ED, author of Simplicity Parenting who is a consultant and trainer to over 110 U.S. schools and a private family counselor for twenty seven years, believes that our kids are frazzled with too much media.   He has even done detailed studies comparing children from war-torn 3rd world countries who live day to day with so called 1st world countries like the US and Canada.  His conclusion was that emotionally and pyschologically, exposing our children to television, mass media advertising and electronics at a young age has the exact same effect as an early childhood spent in places like war-ravaged Bosnia or famine-ridden Somalia.  Kim Payne goes on to explain how the diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) is growing, and prevelant in as high as 11% in our young children.  Interestingly also is that the diagnosis of ADHD is far higher on the eastern seaboard vs the west.  Factors influencing this could possibly include more emphasis on alternative school systems, and increased play in the outdoors in western areas.

In 1997 over five million people, mostly children, in the United States were prescribed Ritalin, and this is a rise of 700% since 1990. Moreover, at the 1998 Consensus Conference on ADHD of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) one of the stated conclusions was that “there is no evidence that treatment [Ritalin and behavioral therapy] improves academic achievement or long-term outcomes.”

Thoughts like “I was raised with television, and I turned out fine” are common.  But as parents, we’ve also grown up in a world of smoking on airplanes, no-seat belts and children with scattered or limited attention spans.  Our family has seen first hand how videos can directly cause night terrors.  Once we tossed our TV and eliminated (not just reduced) child oriented videos, our kids creative play has flourished.  In fact, this is why Waldorf takes such a hard stance on media – your children watching TV will directly impact the style and nature of play of other children they play with.  How many times have you heard a parent say “I just don’t know where she got that language from?”.  It’s often from the media your child’s friends consume. And as Dr. Gordon Neufeld says, you must not let your child’s peers raise your children (author of “Hold onto Your Kids”).  Dr. Gabor Mate who has studied and treated many kinds of addiction on Vancouver’s drug addicted lower East side sees the affects of parents letting peers raise their kids first hand.

3) Non-competitive Environment

Like many parents of our generation, life without media or competitive sports is a hard pill to swallow.  But for young kids especially, they simply prefer to co-operate and not have their skills constantly evaluated or tested.  Similarly, the Waldorf curriculum does not place importance on seat work and memorization for the purposes of testing.  The children actually write and illustrate their own handmade “text books” which are really more like organic journals that integrate their own creative works.  Learning is specific to the individual, and so there are no cookie-cutter approaches to the evaluation of student learning.  And learning is really simplified so that the same concept is approached using various learning methods vs just solely lecture.  The only real time for sit-down learning is not more than 2 hours in the morning.  Then the rest of the day, activities are created to reinforce a single core lesson, but in different forms such as art/painting and crafts that use finger or handwork, as well as acting out lessons in plays and seasonal festivals.  Children also learn by doing real “work”, such as cooking for groups, needle work, building, measuing and creating wood projects.  There is a sense of steady and predictable routine, which is important for maintaining comfort and safety, especially for young children.

4) Family Focused

In Waldorf schools, the teacher will follow the children up from Grade 1 through to Grade 8.  Other specialized or guest teachers will rotate through each class, but for the most part, a given student will have a consistent role-model, almost a surrogate parent,  follow them through their education.  The teacher is seen as the authoritative leader of the classroom, just like a parent.  Lessons that involve home-like work such as cooking, making bread and cleaning up, sweeping the floor are rehearsed and demonstrated by the teacher and students.  Even the surroundings of a typical Waldorf school classroom is focussed on calming colours for children, with typically soft pink or peach on the walls.  Cloths, silks and rugs soften the look and feel of each room, with faceless dolls to inspire creativity, and natural earth tone colours in all furnishings.  Most items, toys and furniture are wood where possible, or handmade.  This again reinforces a home-like atmosphere which is familiar, safe and conducive to learning.

5) Integrates The Natural World

Outdoor play is central to Waldorf learning.  This supports the integration of seasonal lessons and stories into the curriculum. The four seasonal festivals are Michaelmas (fall), Christmas (winter), Easter (spring), and St. John (summer). Children have daily sessions of outdoor play, not confined to short recesses, but longer periods of active time.  Crafts are always with natural fibres such as wet-felting, finger-knitting and needle-felting using wool dyed with natural inks.  Woodworking is common and even the outdoor playground more resembles something you would erect out of ropes and timbers if you were shipwrecked on an island.  Branches, leaves, plants, vines and soil are played with on a regular basis.  Waldorf schools can be considered “spiritual” in their ideas of “Mother Earth”, but they are not specifically religious, and are very open to all beliefs.  Natural beauty is echoed in all things Waldorf, from paintings to flower pressings to the festivals in each season.

“Creativity is as important as literacy” in our education system, he says.  ”We are educating people out of their creativity”.  He has advised the British government on Education issues, and was even knighted for his efforts.  I’ve also read his book entitled “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything”.

It is a tough job being transparent to the all seeing of a child. What this means for me is working on walking the talk with the kids. Pausing and looking more at what I do, and the genuine affect it has on my children. It is scary the power we have in molding these little people.

My dear friend, and date for the Waldorf night, saw this clearly. She is afraid to put the following quote on her fridge: “Am I worthy of imitation?” And frankly, so am I. Google “am i worthy of imitation” and you get umpteen references to the bible. From what I’ve been told though, nothing associated with God is easy.

Lack of movement connected to poor learning.

I was telling my mom today that we are researching schooling options for our kids. She pointed out a good series of articles she had read in the Toronto Star. Check out the Atkinson Fellowship Series of articles, and watch for the marshmallow test.

We all want smart kids, and these articles discuss how well education systems help to reach this goal. As parents though, self-esteem is of more concern – we feel being smart is a by-product of children feeling secure physically, emotionally and otherwise. We are concerned that the public system is archaic and too stressed for resources to provide teachers with what they need to educate our children well.

Allana Mitchell writes: ”[Teachers] are having a biological influence on children that is in scale akin to a baby’s growth in the womb. No other profession has this sway over the fundamental cellular structure of so many human beings.”  We need to value our teachers more.

Neuroscience is changing how we look at our children and their development. It is exciting to see teachers taking inspiration from the growing field of brain sciences. We have a boy and a girl. This week I’ve talked with friends who have boys in the public system, which is not serving them because boys learn differently and learning is designed more with girls in mind. With our daughter, we are concerned about her self-esteem and how competitive environments are shown to quash a child’s long-term self-motivation. It saddens me that we may have to look to private options and that we are so far behind in Canada. But despite all the hurdles the system will face if it is to change, there does appear to be light at the end of the education tunnel.

The Fear of Having Stupid Children

The Globe and Mail has some words of caution in What’s So Wrong With Raising Little Einsteins.

Written By: Nicole LeBlanc Charlwood