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?
Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School
Huh, that’s interesting that it was around the same time period. It also sounds similar, minus some of the mysticism and anti-science and more anti-government. I wonder if those students had better experiences. Again, I’m sure it depends on the specific instructors and leadership members at the location, since the curriculum is not centralized. I have to wonder if this could be an advantage to having more emphasis on the topics important to that community/region, as opposed to a generalized education curriculum.
Wait, is this real? Is our concept of a modern school built on a movement based in Anarchy, Libertarianism, and rationalism?
Quite the rabbit hole here…
Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader, ed: Mark Bray & Robert H. Haworth (PM Press, 2018)