I set out to write a post about the differences between Waldorf and The Well-Trained Mind for the Early Grades, since the post about Waldorf and The Well-Trained Mind in the Early Years was fairly popular.

It has been difficult to write this post.  I do know homeschooling mothers who seem adept enough to combine both a classical approach with Waldorf elements, but I found it extremely difficult to find the similarities because the assumed views on childhood development is just so very different. Please feel free to add in comments at the bottom to assist other mothers.

Here is a little chart I made to keep track of things, and you can see for yourself where things coincide or don’t.

The First Four Grades:

The approach that Waldorf takes looks at the journey of the entire child, academic and spiritual and moral.   Every subject is picked, choosen and presented in a way to coincide, fulfill and enhance where the child’s soul development is at that time.   Christopher Bamford writes in the Introduction to “Human Values in Education”:  “Education today, like so much else, suffers from a split between theory and practice or actuality.  Most educational philosophies are theoretical and divorced from life.  The experiment with children, because they are no longer able to approach them with their hearts and souls.” 

To me, The Well-Trained Mind can be rather contradictory as it assumes many things about training logic in young children when the premise of the book is that the logic stage comes much later in childhood development. Waldorf Education is about soul economy, about introducing things at the right time as the child’s maturation and abilities unfold to be able to meet the academic demands.  The curriculum is matched to the soul development of the child. 

I personally also truly dislike the focus on history during the Early Years – as I explained to a friend, I have a hard time really grasping the time period of Ancient Egypt and such and I am a grown-up!  I do not think that starting with the tangible things around a small child will lead a child to be egocentric in world views as they grow, mature and develop.   The ability the Waldorf curriculum develops in compassion, gratitude, love and responsibility can be translated in looking at any time period and in studying any culture.  These qualities transcend academic areas and are indeed the heart of Waldorf curriculum.

My other quibble with The Well-Trained Mind is the focus on what I call “fact-jamming” in the Early Elementary Grades.  It fits in well with the view of current society, and also the view that the child is a miniature adult with less experience and therefore just needs to be “filled up” with facts, but this is not Waldorf’s view of the child.  Waldorf views the child as full of their own potential, on their own path, and that we essentially help and assist what is “unfolding.”  That is a distinct difference!

Waldorf looks at education as the way to secure the  future health of the child once they become an adult and establishing an almost Renaissance kind of education.  Health is of utmost concern.  In this day of skyrocketing ADD/ADHD, childhood obesity, sensory processing disorders, teenaged drug abuse and other adult problems setting into the early years of childhood, it is well worth your time as a parent to look into!

To a future healthy society,

Carrie

There  is a FABULOUS article by Eugene Schwartz on his website entitled, “Discover Waldorf Education:  ADHD, The Challenge of Our Times.”

The article is very long, but I encourage all of you out there to get a cup of tea and sit down with it when your kids are asleep.  It will make you think!

Here is the link:

http://knol.google.com/k/eugene-schwartz/-/110mw7eus832b/12#view

Here is the ending part of the article that I think gives food for thought to ALL parents, but the article itself has so many interesting things it addresses, from Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences to communication strategies.

Here are the words of Mr. Schwartz, again from toward the ending of the article:

“A basic tenet in Steiner’s developmental picture is the understanding that whatever in our childhood acts upon us from “outside” will in adulthood be transformed into forces that work from within. A child who lacks the living example of a self-assured and guiding adult will have to struggle, in later life, to attain inner assurance and inner guidance. A youngster who is not exposed to the kind but clear precepts of outer discipline will find it difficult to attain true inner discipline as an adult. If we cannot steel ourselves so that we meet the children with certainty in our will and clarity in our intentions, we are depriving them of one of childhood’s most valuable experiences.

In the United States, which, after all, is a nation founded on the Divine right of freedom of choice, it is a mighty task indeed to overcome this dogged tendency to ask children questions! Our whole culture summons forth the interrogative voice:

“Are you ready to wake up? Do you want to stay in bed awhile? Should we decide what to wear today? Would you like the Chanel sweater or the Polo sweatshirt? The Tommy Hilfinger pullover? Do you want to wear your Guess shorts or your Calvin Klein jeans? How about the DKNY pair? Gap? The relaxed fit with the button fly or the zipper fly? Ready for breakfast? What would you like — Cheerios, Corn Flakes, Wheaties, Granola? Granola with almond chunks? Granola with raisin bits?…How about strawberries? No? Blueberries? Bananas? Do you want to sweeten it with honey? Maple syrup? Sugar? White or brown?…Do you want milk? One percent? Two percent? Skim? Organic? Eden Soy with minerals or Rice Dream with calcium?…”

And these are just the first two minutes of the day! — a day that moves from question to question, with nary a word of declarative guidance on the part of parents or other adults. When a question is asked of a child, she assumes that you expect an answer, and I have heard many children answer questions like the above with witty or even downright rude answers!

Such domestic scenes are part of the dilemma of raising children in a country that rightfully calls itself “The Land of the Free,” but has lost the capacity to distinguish between the potentially independent, “free” adult and the highly dependent and “unfree” child. It may be asked, of course, how can we train our children to be free later in life if we don’t give them choices in childhood? Yet, even for adults, real freedom is a capacity which can unfold only on occasion, for life is filled with necessities that impinge upon our freedom. When we ask a child to make a choice, several things occur. First of all, we ask the child to draw upon capacities for judgment that he does not yet have. On what basis will a seven year-old make a choice? Invariably, on the basis of sympathy and antipathy. And whence does he get this sympathy and antipathy? From his astral body, that is, from a member of his being that should not be “activated” until adolescence. An analogy might prove helpful here:

We can think of the child’s astral body as “soul principal” which is being held in a “cosmic trust fund” until such time as the youngster’s lower members are developed enough to receive it, i.e., ages 13-15. As is the case with a monetary trust fund in an earthly bank, it is the trustee’s responsibility to see that the principal is not disturbed for the apportioned period, knowing that the interest that it generates provides sufficient funds for the beneficiary’s needs. If, however, the trustee proves to be irresponsible, and the youngster for whom the principal is intended gets hold of it long before he is mature enough to make wise financial decisions, the principal will be drawn upon prematurely. In the worst case, the entire trust will be depleted, leaving neither interest nor principal at a time in the young person’s life that they are most needed.

In the course of healthy development, the young child has just enough astrality apportioned to her to sustain those organic processes requiring movement and catabolism, and to support such soul phenomena as the unfolding of interest in the world. And where do ADHD children have their greatest difficulties? In developing and sustaining any interest in anything for very long! The environments that we create for our youngest children, the way we speak to our grade schoolers, and our inability to differentiate between what is appropriate for an adult and not appropriate for a child – all of these phenomena eat away at astral “interest” early in life and devour astral “principal” long before it has ripened. By the time many “normal” young people are twelve or thirteen they seem to have lost interest in learning, or even in life; they have “been there, done that,” and take on a jaded, middle-aged attitude toward their own future. The ADHD child is only an extreme reflection of soul attitudes that will be endemic to many American children at the century’s end.

The entire thrust of the childrearing methods developed by the leading lights of Generations One and Two has led to the soul bankruptcy of today’s children just as inexorably as the financial and banking policies of the first two-thirds of the century have led to the specter of the National Debt and the collapse of scores of savings and loan associations in the past decade. ADHD is not merely a phenomenon that has arisen alongside modern education and child psychology; it is the logical end product of those erroneous pictures of the human being and the methods arising from them. Children do not need choices; they need guidance.

When an adult asks a young child to make a choice, the adult relinquishes the majesty and power that should be hers by dint of experience and acquired wisdom. In that moment, child and adult become equal; over the course of many such moments of choice, this equality becomes habitual, and the sweetest children gradually turn into little tyrants who wield the power to determine the restaurants in which the family will eat, the movies that they will see, the malls in which they will shop. We don’t have to watch situation comedies on TV to experience the ubiquity of such children in modern life! The children so chillingly documented in the diaries of Thomas Gordon’s epigones (see Chapter One) were but harbingers of things to come.

Most importantly, we should realize that a child who is given too many choices will become an adult who has difficulty making decisions. While choice, according to definition, “implies broadly the freedom of choosing from a set of persons or things,” decision is defined as “the act of reaching a conclusion or making up one’s mind,” and also, interestingly, as “firmness of character or action; determination.” This is not merely a semantic matter; there is a real difference between these two acts. The power to decide, I would claim, is built upon the ability to accept the decisions of adults in one’s youth. (This assumes, of course, that one encounters adults who are themselves capable of making decisions.) Childish choosing draws on those very forces of soul and spirit that are meant to mature and become adult decisiveness. In an article on children’s rights, Federal Judge Mary Kohler emphasized “the right to be a child during childhood” and emphasized that one of the impediments to the achievement of this “inalienable” right is the “too early forcing of choices upon children.”

It is instructive to look at the generation that now leads America, the postwar “baby boomers,” who were encouraged to become “a generation of choosers.” How many among them are truly decisive people? And how many of them are notorious for their difficulties in deciding even the smallest matters, not to speak of making such major life decisions as, whom should I marry (or unmarry)? what should my vocation be? what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Or take the case of “Dr. Laura”:

In person, the woman who has tapped into America’s confused superego so successfully is an intense 49-year-old [with] the unmistakable air of someone who is sure she’s always right. When asked if she has ever given anyone the wrong advice, she does not hesitate: No, never. Which may be what makes her such an irresistible figure for these ambivalent times when, given a choice, many of us would prefer to have no choice [italics mine]. Tell me what to do, her callers ask, and I’ll do it. I’d do the right thing if I knew what the right thing was. And if the authority figure is a little mean and a little harsh, if she calls your behavior “stupid” instead of “self-defeating,” isn’t that what we all think anyway?

Dr. Laura Schlesinger’s callers and her millions of listeners are people who very likely had doting, progressive parents who wanted them to be happy and gave them as many choices as possible! The effect of such indecisiveness can be amusing, but it has its serious consequences as well. With disturbing frequency, one guru or Master after another passes through our country and charismatically draws a host of followers to his community or ashram. Some of those drawn are simple, easily-influenced souls who can barely manage their own lives. However, the media and other arbiters of conventional wisdom are inevitably surprised at how many disciples are intelligent, highly-educated “professionals,” who willingly relinquish their right to make any decisions about the rest of their lives, believing that their Master is far better able to do so. Members of the crème de la crème of the Generation of Choosers, having arrived at mature adulthood, now search for the decisive teacher that they lacked in their childhood!

&The simplicity of life in earlier days was accompanied by a lack of choices — which we would today find boring — but this in turn led to a consistency of life which we today might find healing. This is no turning back from the “freedom of choice” that we as adults expect, but we must recognize that a pre-determined and expectable course of events strengthens the etheric body of the child, and it is this which provides a healthy foundation for behavioral stability and predictability in childhood, as well as for the capacity to make important decisions in later life.

We can encompass the child with our own certainty by creating a form into which the child enters every day. For parents, this means establishing a regular rhythm of bedtimes and mealtimes, a secure and serene “time-environment” in which the child’s etheric body is free to do its work. A young child who “decides for herself” when she is ready for bedtime, or who refuses to go to sleep until her parents have turned in, as well, begins to weaken her etheric forces in early childhood. Toddlers who are free to “eat when they’re hungry,” to help themselves at the refrigerator or, on their own, “nuke their food” at the microwave oven may be nourishing their physical nature, but are not providing the rhythmical and social nurture that their etheric body requires.

Parents may contend that they give their children free reign in these two matters because “the child’s body knows best.” “I can’t crawl under her skin and know when she’s hungry or tired – she has to tell me! And she knows a lot better than I do which foods she needs,” etc. In spite of the parents’ protestations that they are leaving their children free in their interest of their psychological and physical health, a sensitive observer can usually judge by their “waif-like” appearance which children have been allowed to decide their own bedtimes and left to fend for themselves in the kitchen. Invariably, children who are “free” to make choices about these fundamental matters look unhealthy, have less physical stamina and a shorter attention span than their peers and are not much inclined to cooperate in any activity that they find antipathetic or laborious. That is to say, even at the nursery school level, we find such children manifesting behavior that fits the general description of ADHD. It is no wonder that Ritalin is now being prescribed for children at an ever-younger age.

If sleeping and eating are not guided by the certainty and clarity of their parents, even those children who come from well-to-do households and have been “given everything” nonetheless appear to be as neglected as a child raised by a dysfunctional inner city family. In my own work with New York City public school children, I’ve met youngsters who came from tragic backgrounds (a father killed or unknown, a mother heavily addicted or in jail) who despite all of this sorrow appeared healthy and lively. In every such situation, the child was being raised by the grandmother, who, untouched by the theories of contemporary child psychology, insisted on a consistent bedtime and prepared meals with care and regularity. As the psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer has observed of his young patients, “Children who are pushed into adult experience do not become precociously mature. On the contrary, they cling to childhood longer, perhaps all of their lives.”

We might turn our thoughts for a moment to Helen Keller, whose multiple disabilities make her something of a paradigm of the behavioral problems of our time. Helen’s handicaps led her to evince behavior that ran the full gamut from depression to hysteria, from autism to ADHD. And then Annie Sullivan entered Helen’s life, struggled to find the right approach to this seemingly insoluble problem, and succeeded. In a newspaper interview with Annie Sullivan, her interlocutor said, “You worked miracles with Helen because you got her to love you,” to which Annie Sullivan replied, “No; first Helen had to learn to obey me. Obedience came first, then came love.”

From a more contemporary perspective, here are the words of a mother of two schoolchildren who needed her attention during an outbreak of lice:

I realize that I love my children more for having gone through this with them. I know that nobody else could really have taken care of them with the same spirit that I did…And there is one more thing. I learned that I could do something with my children to which they are totally opposed. No amount of distraction, crying, screaming or complaining could take me off my task; I was going to do what was necessary to take care of them, and they were going to comply. There was no flexibility.

This was a big hurdle for me, but I think that my children now have a better sense of who’s in charge and why they need that, and perhaps they even love me a little more for being in charge. All this, thanks to head lice.

If what the childraising theorists cited in the previous chapter indicate is true, those children who are being born in the 1990s, who will be coming of age in the next Millennium, challenge us — and are themselves challenged — in the sphere of the will. Writers on childraising methods such as John Rosemond and Mary Sheedy Kurcinka may provide accurate descriptions of the behavior of these “spirited” or “strong-willed” children, and may also suggest helpful ways of dealing with their behavior so as to make home life harmonious (or at least bearable!) but their writings do not help us understand why it is particularly the will that is unfolding in children at this point in our century. Nor are they able to articulate just what the will is, nor, most importantly, what the relationship of human will is to what Kurcinka vaguely (and somewhat arbitrarily) characterizes as spirit.

It is here that Waldorf education may have its greatest contribution to make to the challenge of ADHD. By laying the foundation for their educational methods on the principle of the whole human being, Waldorf teachers do not stop with the static concept of “multiple intelligence.” Rather, they help an intelligent multiplicity to thrive in every child in the classroom, recognizing that every child needs to cultivate her linguistic side, her bodily-kinesthetic side, her spatial side, etc. Indeed, we can see that part of the genesis of ADHD lies in the stifling of too many facets of a child’s nature so that a one-sided “intelligence” can shine at the expense of all else. Waldorf education can not “cure” ADHD, but its theories and its practices can serve to mitigate hyperactive tendencies in young children, and can be an important part of the treatment of older children faced with this challenge of our times. Some measure of the importance of understanding the challenge may be gleaned by words spoken by Rudolf Steiner one year after the first Waldorf school had been opened:

External earthly life, insofar as it is a product of earlier times, will pass away — and it is an entirely vain hope to believe that the old habits of thought and will can continue. What must arise is a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of willing in all domains. We must familiarize ourselves with the thought of the vanishing of a civilization; but we must look into the human heart, into the spirit dwelling in man; we must have faith in the heart and spirit of man in order that through all we are able to do within the wreckage of the old civilization, new forms may arise, forms that are truly new…”

(End of article by Eugene Schwartz).

Again, please go read this article in its entirety. It has everything to do with the way we parent our children, no matter what challenges they face.  You will learn a lot about yourself as a parent in reading this article, and a lot about your child.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz, for making me think today.  There are many wonderful articles on the Millennial Child website available at this link:  http://www.millennialchild.com/ and the experience and perspective of a Master Waldorf Teacher such as Eugene Schwartz is well-worth listening to and thinking about!

His grades CD’s are also truly invaluable in lesson planning, so if you have not checked those out, have a look!

Have a thinking day,

Carrie

(Note:  There are also mention of several Waldorf resources for spiritual education at home in this post, so if you are searching for those read towards the bottom).

My faith is very important to me, and I believe that God put His hand on my heart to teach my children about having a very personal  faith and beliefs of our denomination.  Someone asked me how I fit our religious studies in with Waldorf homeschooling, so I thought I would outline it here:

1.  One of the number one things we do is to model – I read the Bible, we pray for people in need, we pray in thanksgiving for God’s blessings, we pray before meals.  We try very hard to be thankful in all circumstances, to see the positive, to love everyone and to help people when we can.   Our faith is just part of everyday life.

2. As a family, we show gratitude, wonder and respect for God’s creation – all the different people and cultures in the world, the Earth and all the wonderful things in nature.

3.  It is  a priority to take children to church and to be involved in church.  Making our Sundays a day of true Sabbath is an important priority in our family right now.  I found this great little booklet called, “A Day of Delight:  Making Sunday the Best Day of the Week” and its 26 pages has really helped me plan and organize  to make Sunday a true day of rest, worship and family time.  It is published by Doorposts Publishing in Oregon, and I have not done any Google searches to see if it is available over the Internet, but for the small cost it is a worthy read!

4.  We have family devotions in the morning at breakfast.  Last year we used “Leading Little Ones to God”, which had some parts that I had to modify for my own denominational beliefs, but it was a great introduction for a young crowd.  Right now we are using “Our 24 Family Ways:  Family Devotional Guide”, which is a bit over my almost five-year-old’s head, (and every devotional starts with questions to think about, which is not my favorite for the under 7 crowd) but about right for my almost eight-year-old and you can certainly modify it any way you see fit.   That is the beautiful thing about homeschooling and living together! 

We also model trying to grow in our own faith, and I usually have some sort of a Beth Moore Bible Study going on – it is harder for me to get out at night, so I just go to Lifeways Christian Bookstore and buy a participant copy of whatever study interests me and the audio CD’s and do it myself!  Right now I am studying the Book of Daniel. 

5.  Every Friday in lieu of school, we held a Peace Circle and had a time to spend in learning about God.  This past year I picked a Fruit of the Spirit for every month of school (worked out well because we spent nine months in school and there are nine fruits, so we had one fruit for each month) and each Friday we had an example from the Bible and an activity focused on that Fruit.   I also did an adult study of Beth Moore’s on this subject at the same time. 

This coming year we will be using “Young Children and Worship” Bible stories with some of the accompanying wooden figures to wind our way through the Bible for both children.   I also have materials specific to the missions of our church and denomination. 

On Fridays this year, I will also be telling stories out of Rudolf Copple’s “To Grow and Become” which are stories told in the Waldorf tradition.    You can find this book through the Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore –which, by the way, you will be able to order off of on-line starting in July!- or Bob and Nancy’s Bookshop.  The Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore’s catalog has this to say about this little book:  “These stories were told-not read- in a Waldorf school by the class teacher, in place of religious instruction, on Fridays during the last period of the day.  No retelling or other work with them was done.  The intention was to bring a spiritual content to the children for the weekend.”

(You may know that during Rudolf Steiner’s time there were religious lessons taught by a local priest to the Catholic students at the school and also a Protestant leader for the Protestant students, and then there was also a period of spiritual studies for those with no religious background.    At least that is my understanding from reading the lectures in “Soul Economy”, but I have never asked anyone about this directly!)

6.  We routinely review, pray for and save our money for the missions our  church and denomination are working with and sponsoring.    You could do this with any charity you choose.  One of my favorite other charities is  this one:  http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.204586/    Heifer International.

7.  We celebrate the festivals and holidays of our denomination and faith throughout the year in celebration of liturgical year.  This year, besides the materials of our denomination and the Bible, we will be using the book, “Celebrating the Festivals of the Year” by Irene Johansen, which is a book that has stories for many of the festivals and holidays we celebrate and can be found at www.waldorfbooks.org or Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore.

I celebrate all of you who are walking in faith with your children.  I believe faith  and a personal relationship with the Creator is an extremely important part of a child’s life.   I hope all of you work to bring your children up in the belief that there is something bigger than themselves at work in this wondrous world, because it really does affect children in a positive way.  If you have no particular faith or religious path, I encourage you to explore this.   It is not only the essence of Waldorf education, but the foundation of life.

Be the positive light you wish to see,

Carrie