I invite you to my humble blog, where I am trying to document our adventures…

http://adventuresinsteiner.wordpress.com

You’ll find an extended version of my comment in there, as an answer to a friend who doesn not believe I should have taken the children out of school so soon… [sigh]

I shall keep reading you daily, you’re a wonderful source of inspiration!

Keep up the good work..

Many blessings,

Maria

I have to say I identify 100% with Mrs Marsha’s views, and our very short experience of “mainstream” school (half a term!) just served to reinforce my belief that the only path for us is Waldorf education.

My children reacted very negatively to the “discipline” of primary school. They were given yellow and red cards (?!) and were sent to the headteacher’s office almost every day for time-out! Only for them to attempt running away and hide under tables or into the playground! On hearing what was going on I just thought to myself “these people will not clip our wings!”

That and the very dry presentation of material, the lack of imagination and the distance imposed between the child and the “topic”. I went to one of my children’s assemblies and to my horror found the 5-6 year olds reading facts about spiders and insects that they could barely understand (“there are 30,000 species of spiders in the world” – I thought “if only they were left to go outside to see and touch ONE little spider, that would mean SO much more to them!”), and presenting in a huge screen attached to a laptop (which was being manned by a boy who had just lost his first tooth!) a long selection of “pictures of flowers we found on the internet”. That moment I realised we were in the wrong place!

They were given “homework” and asked to present it in index cards written by themselves. They were encouraged to use the internet for research (!) and / or encyclopedias. Mine don’t read or write yet, so we decided to felt butterflies and learn a short poem about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, for them to recite in class while moving the butterfly’s wings up and down. Well, guess what? They were not allowed to do that because “their work was not written” (double !! – actually, that day I just felt like ^%*&= uttering expletives! hahahaha)

Ah, and not to mention my kids’ questions about religion – it was a Catholic school, and although I was reassured by the headteacher that spirituality was presented in a “developmentally appropriate manner”, I soon realised we had very different ideas about what “child development” meant. One day my 5 year old said: “they told us that Baby Jesus died, mummy… And that he was alive again three days later. That’s a lie!” The other child asked who the “holy spirit” was… “Oh dear”, I thought, “this is getting insane… We’re not even religious in our family. We’ve got to get out of that school NOW!

And so I swiftly scooped them out and took them home, where we are beginning our home-education journey. Our previous experience in a Waldorf Kindergarten was mostly wonderful, so I knew they could go back on track very quickly. And they are!

Thank you for your blog, Carrie. You are a great inspiration!