What is the SD on Rudolf Steiner schools?
A colleague sends his kid to a Steiner nursery round the corner from me and tells me it’s fantastic - the kids play outside in the rain with sticks!
Googling it brings up some mild eyebrow-raising themes: No reading before the age of 8, quasi-religious flavour to the whole teaching endeavour, a bit wobbly on the sciences etc. Is this fair comment?
If anyone attended a Steiner School, what’s it really like?
Ah, anthroposophy!
Waldorf answers - What is Waldorf education? (more info about Steiner and Anthroposophy at this site too)
But I’m sure you already knew that. 
A friend of mine was into Steiner, and an acquantance sent her kids to the Waldorf school. From what I gleaned, it was not real structured.
I never could relate to what they told me about the movement. I was given several books by Steiner to peruse, but could not (or would not) wrap my mind around them.
I look forward to seeing others with more knowledge on the subject contribute to this thread.
Did Waldorf for my kids for a few years until the cost just became too much. There’s something to it, but yes, there is a definite quasi-religious feel to it all. It helps if you look at it like a holistic education. The focus on the early years, K-2nd grade, is essentially socialization and learning who you are as a kid. There is a little bit of academics, but mostly it’s just guiding the kids while they do what they do best: Playing. Beginning sometime in 2nd grade or 3rd they actually start reading & doing math & more traditional academics. The actual curriculum and structure is available from different websites so i won’t go into it here.
The philosophy behind it all is that kids are naturally curious and will want to learn, but not if you force them to undertake learning that is beyond where they are developmentally. Forcing kindergarteners to read is seen as detremental to their development in other areas. it does make sense, really, but the spiritual nature of the school can really freak some people out. Basically what people refer to as “cultist” refers to the teaching that everything has a place and a purpose in the world; that everything and everyone is to be respected as having a meaningful purpose; and that everyone can contribute to society in a positive way. Crazy, eh? It gets funky though because little kids respond readily to fairy tales and magic, and so these themes are sometimes used to drive those ideas home. The teacher creates an environment in which the magic and fairy tales tend to dominate the teaching themes, which is easy to pull off because at that age these things still are real to them. Most grown ups would prefer to squash silly fantasy at an early age, Waldorf fosters it.
Anyway, I wasn’t involved in it long enough to offer much of a story, but I do know that when my oldest was transferred to a public school beginning in 3rd grade she was unable to read and her math skills were rudimentary at best. But she wanted to learn. By the end of the school year she was both reading and doing math well into the 5th grade level, and she was well known as an especially kind child who frequently championed the less popular kids. She’s wrapping up 6th grade in June now, and will be enrolling in her middle school’s gifted/talented program. She has an average IQ but an insatiable desire to learn coupled with enormous compassion. And she managed all of that in spite of moving 4 times in 5 years, her parents divorcing, and having an insane little brother. The “late” academic start in no way held her down.
That said, every school is different. Some are run by certifiable crackpots and others have done an excellent job at grasping the concepts of the curricula and are able to run a private school like professionals.
My wife did Waldorf as a kid for a while, and her mom used to run a school.
Her opinions of the good are all appended with the qualifaction “…in theory.” The learning track is very unsynchronized with mainstream schooling, and “in theory” if a child stays in the system for the duration of their primary education then they will realize the benefits. In practice, though, children rarely stay the duration and tend to be ill adapted for mainstream when they leave…critically behind in some areas (reading and math especially), but way ahead in others.
When I lived in Charlottesville, VA, there weren’t a lot of educational alternatives, and I had lots of friends whose children went to the local Waldorf School.
I was very impressed with them. They were heavy into the humanities, but they were creative, funny, well-spoken and smart. ( I suspect that those who didn’t thrive in that environment did end up somewhere else.)
One of my friends transferred to the University of Chicago, and her daughter had a hard time adjusting. She was in (about, my memory is hazy) fourth grade, but reading on a high school level. She knew very little math or science, and her learning style involved taking a blank notebook and starting to research what she needed to know. The local public school didn’t know what to do with her, and the local private schools were already University prep by that age and didn’t want to deal with her. They did some home schooling and eventually took her to a Waldorf School that involved a long commute, but where she fit in.
Another friend tried Waldorf for her son, and it didn’t work out at all. He has some issues (maybe somewhere towards the mild end of the autism spectrum?) and the lack of structure sent him spiraling out of control. The school finally asked them to take him elsewhere, because he was creating a negative experience for other students. (Private schools can do that.)
Lastly, an acquaintance is an early childhood reading specialist. She told me once that Waldorf uses a technique to teach reading that involves immersing a child in every kind of language that isn’t reading. They sing songs, memorize poetry, act out plays, tell stories, listen to world literature (heavy on myths and folktales, as Inigo Montoya said) being read aloud. They talk about words, they do interpretive dance to poetry, they draw pictures of stories, they make sculptures of favorite scenes, they do all kinds of things around reading. The result is a very rich linguistic field, and a very typical Waldorf experience is children who don’t read at all until third grade or so, then suddenly read at eighth grade level.
Since her expertise is in learning difficulties around reading, she has some concerns with this. Almost all reading disorders are easier to deal with when a child is 5 than when they are 11, and if there is no reading, those issues get missed. For “normal” children, it works quite well, except that they fail all the No Child Left Behind tests for the first several years. (There are a few public/charter schools that use the Waldorf method.)
Maybe more than you wanted to know? FWIW, I seriously considered Waldorf for my child, but went with a different charter school that has worked very well for her.
My mom taught kindergarten in a Waldorf school early in her career (the 50s). Believe me, she is NOT a person who is into nutty things!! The gist of how she explained it to me is, for example, a carpenter would come in and show the kids how he works, what he does, how he does it, etc. and by experiencing the whole process, the child would learn the underlying principles like measuring, planning, math, etc. So everything they learn would be through the example of seeing someone do something in real life.
My older brother went to a Waldorf school from 8-12 grade. He had some learning disabilities, and was basically falling through the cracks at our public school. I don’t know whether it was the Waldorf school’s techniques/curricula, or merely the fact of small class size and more one-on-one attention (plus, that hippy-dippy sentiment pervasive in Waldorf schools likely helped, in that his teachers actually cared about his progress … unlike in our public school), but he did very well. No “genius” moment or anything, but slow, plodding, steady progress, that actually enabled him to go on, get into, and graduate from college. My parents had assumed that they would have to get him into a trade program or send him off to the military after high school, until they saw his progress at the Waldorf school.
… that said, I have some VERY strong opinions on the whole “Biodynamics” pseudoscience that many Steiner/Waldorf schools espouse. But I don’t think that poisons the well in the other areas.