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.
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