Energy-reading Waldorf, Montessori and Reggio Emilia

Waldorf, Montessori and Reggio Emilia are three alternative education approaches that a lot of progressive parents are drawn to, whether they are homeschooling or putting their children into schools.  My daughter will soon be 3, so I've been exploring different ideas around education and wanted to have a deeper understanding of these philosophies and methods.

last week after enquiring about a waldorf kindergarten that only takes 4 yr olds, i was on the bus and decided to energy-read what steiner was trying to do with his outlines for children (i haven't actually read what he's written)...to summarize it quickly i got that he was communicating something about the relationship with the child coming in as spirit and adapting to the material world. so for that star/earth mix to work the best (healthy integration), his suggestions involved a systematic grounding that didn't break the spirit awareness (which i think often happened) but helped it adapt to earth-based reality so it could survive. i could see from this that he used his own cultural myths and ideas around spirit - if he were more aware of other cultures' ways of conceptualizing this, the waldorf schools might have different traditions.

later i decided to energy-read it some more and compare it to montessori and reggio. then i read more about waldorf on the internet and found some interesting correlations. so for instance i felt there was a strong theosophical thread in steiner's philosophy and yesterday i looked up theosophy on wikipedia and it turns out his foundation was in theosophy but then he branched off with his own version.

so here is more of the energy-reading:

my sense is that the thrust of the waldorf approach is quite humanistic, wanting to create well-rounded people and 'world citizens'. i feel it is trying to correct something having to do with an imbalance between what i'll call feminine and masculine (matter/spirit) energy in a patriarchal environment. i feel that it was very much speaking to the tensions of it's time and place (1925 germany) and also stamped with the biases of that location. so for instance, even though steiner tries to privilege certain aspects of the feminine (and so waldorf seems compatible with earthy-positive/ap parenting) it also has certain racist ideas (ie some races are more spiritually evolved than others) which bespeak the negative projection of the feminine/matter that germany was grappling with. i think he was doing the best he could from within his own world view.

the feeling i got from montessori was that it was primarily about creating intellectual scaffolding through concrete experiences to stimulate maximum growth of the child. the image i got was of zig zags that hit a wall on each side and caused them to zig in the opposite way (so like a zigzag ladder). it's very practical and realistic, it's a sensory and grounded approach (although not necessarily *grounding* for the child) and promotes self-responsibility, self-correction and learning on one's own. i feel it comes from a world view that the world isn't a particularly nurturing or supportive place and that montessori method helps the child survive and thrive no matter what. through developing good mental habits and conceptual protocols, you preserve yourself in a tough world and can succeed in any environment. i also feel that it takes the natural learning motivation from within the child and grafts in into a system that promotes competency as defined in a fairly mainstream way. so i'm not surprised that montessori shows the best results in terms of testable outcomes - it does well at the job of schooling as it is traditionally understood. i get the feeling that it values a type of creativity that is of a problem solving/applied creative skill sort. not like the imagination type favoured by waldorf.

with reggio, my overall impression was of exploring life (learning) as a creative process. it's the most recently born approach and feels quite post-modern to me. it's also not as set as the other two and i feel that schools that say they use reggio methods could look vastly different. the child follows a unique path, a kind of spiralling out of discovery. i got a very unfolding feeling. i feel like it promotes self-reflexiveness and dialogue between the child and the environment and people around her. i wrote down the words 'internalizing and forming the world through inner feedback loops/processes.' reggio seemed rather abstract to me, yet the one i liked the best. part of my preference for it is that the other two seemed to come from a specific idea/projection of what the world is and the educational method is a response and a solution to the observed problems in that world. whereas reggio does not posit an idea/projection of the world - it kind of seems to believe that the child creates it's world conceptually through this back and forth creative dialectic that is always expanding and building on itself. so the child's identity is constantly grows and is remade as is it's picture of the world. much more law of attraction-ish!

i've been realizing through research and through energy reading that neither waldorf nor montessori are actually pro-attachment parenting. they almost seek to make the child independent of it's family/cultural context (ie. montessori energetically implies you can become competent/accomplished despite what your parents <or anyone> are like or what they do/don't do, and discourages dependence on the teacher - child is supposed to use themselves and peers to move forward). so this also helps me understand how waldorf can say no tv/computers for kids who's environment is totally media rich, and seek to protect children from worldly non-waldorf influences. reggio is the only one that explicitly values interpersonal relationships and interaction as growth experiences and encourages dialogue even if it is conflictual. waldorf is more about receiving/attuning to inner spiritual harmony that then is supposed to manifest in outer harmonious social experiences.