Shannon Phillips

This series written for Salon.com by Andrew O’Hehir does a good job of summing up the reasons why increasing numbers of liberal, educated families like ours—families that tend to start from a strong pro-public-education position—are now choosing to homeschool their children, at least for the first few years. There’s nothing new in these articles, but they explicitly lay out the assumptions and perspectives that underlie the modern liberal homeschooling movement.

In related news, “the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.” Because Texas is one of the largest educational markets in the U.S., this will have a big impact on the textbooks available to public schools in other states as well—possibly even in California, which due to the budget crisis won’t be buying new textbooks until 2014.

News like this makes me glad the homeschooling option exists. Of course, one argument that’s often advanced against liberal homeschooling (and one that O’Hehir acknowledges in his piece) is the idea that, by opting out of the public schools, affluent liberals are making themselves part of the problem. Rather than arranging superior educational opportunities for their children, this argument goes, resourceful and well-educated parents should instead engage with their local schools and boards of education, and make them better.

And in fact, a large number of the liberal homeschoolers do re-integrate their kids into the public school system for middle school or high school, or in earlier grades: O’Hehir says he finds it “unlikely” that his kids will be homeschooled through high school, and I’d say it’s unlikely that my kids would be homeschooled even that long. Still, I think the you’re-part-of-the-problem argument makes for a pretty tough sell. Telling any parent that, yes, you could arrange superior educational opportunities for your children, but instead you should deliberately send them to an inferior school, for the public good: even very liberal parents often don’t find that idea terribly persuasive. We’ll sacrifice our money, we’ll sacrifice our time, but we’re not going to sacrifice the well-being of our kids.

Of course, some public schools are just fine. And some parents are willing to engage with an underperforming school, and try to compensate through their own efforts for whatever the system may lack. I certainly admire moms like Sandra Tsing Loh who commit a hundred percent to their local public schools. But I think there’s a pretty telling passage in Loh’s article:

So I, Pushy Type A Mother, went into overdrive, working a tricky combo of cell phone, Internet, and a level of public-radio quasi-celebrity that enabled me to at least get information-seeking phone calls returned. (In the public-school world, accurate and up-to-date information is gold, and often surprisingly hard to come by.) Less exotic weapons included the “You go, girl!” permission of an open-minded school (not all are) and the ability to write standard English (helpful for laying grant-writing groundwork for overworked teachers). Our reward was a generous gift of 36 brand-new stringed instruments from the VH1 Save the Music Foundation…

The thrust of Loh’s piece is an attempt to shame the “NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school.” But not every NPR-listening parent is Sandra Tsing Loh: most of us don’t have celebrity status to call upon, or a directory full of policy-makers’ cell phone numbers. For the non-pushy, non-Type A, decidedly-non-celebrity parent, taking on the local public school bureaucracy single-handed in order to effect a “Lady Bountiful” miracle of orchestras and free violin lessons simply isn’t a realistic option.

O’Hehir’s conclusion—that public school alternatives are neither a cure nor a toxin for our ailing educational system, but rather “viable and valuable” venues for experimentation—seems reasonable to me. After all, even those who choose to homeschool or send their kids to private schools remain invested in the public education system, as it’s creating the world our kids are going to have to live in.

Waldorf. Let’s talk about Waldorf. See, there’s a lot that’s very appealing about these schools; and a lot that’s very off-putting.

PRO: They provide a calm and beautiful environment for children.

The aesthetics of Waldorf are one of the first things that draws prospective parents. Trust me, I realize exactly how much my class background is showing when I start to enthuse about the natural hand-crafted everythings; it doesn’t change the fact that this is exactly what I want for my kids. Waldorf educators believe that children’s toys should be very simple, so as to encourage imaginative play, but of the highest possible quality: so hand-made dolls; simple wooden play structures and bright-colored silks (real silk, natch, hand-dyed and hand-hemmed) that can be turned into anything from a stage curtain to a superhero cape to a princess skirt; genuine beeswax crayons and paints made from natural plant pigments; handcrafted wooden toys; and so forth. Everything is hand-made from natural materials. The food served to the children is organic and often grown on premises. Yadda yadda.

CON: They are weirdly proscriptive about how children are supposed to use the provided materials.

For instance, they remove the color black from the crayons provided to the younger kids (black is too harsh for their delicate spirits). They don’t allow the kids to paint houses and stick figures in their watercolors, but instead lead them through a series of abstract watercolor shapes that are supposed to represent the developing soul. Yes, you’re seeing a flash of the woo-woo behind the Waldorf.

PRO: They spend a lot of time outdoors, emphasizing our connection to the natural world and learning about the changing seasons.

This is a good article about Waldorf’s commitment to outdoor learning. There’s really no con to this aspect of Waldorf; I’m wholly in favor. There’s some woo-woo here too but it’s far enough backgrounded that I don’t care.

PRO:For young children, they don’t attempt to do academic drills, but rather immerse the children in an environment of storytelling, music, art, dance, and imaginative play. They are really serious about the arts.

Waldorf educators believe children should experience live performances rather than just recorded ones, and similarly, that teachers should tell stories rather than simply reading from books (the idea being that kids learn more about the fundamentals of language when they are engaged in the process of storytelling rather than hearing the same words recited over and over). These stories are often Grimm fairy tales—the originals. Can you fathom how rare it is to find teachers who are telling the original fairy tales, not the Disneyfied versions, to kids these days? I think that’s awesome.

The Waldorf dance program is called Eurythmy and it incorporates some stuff that’s sort of similar to yoga.

CON:Again, the woo-woo. Eurythmy isn’t just a performing art, it’s—like yoga—a spiritual exercise. I’m more or less okay with this, except I don’t like how the newage spiritual content is being disguised as pedagogy. They’re not up front about it at all.

PRO:Waldorf preschools and kindergartens create a delightful, magical environment for small children.

The teachers often tell stories about gnomes: little felt gnomes are common in Waldorf classrooms, and when they go on walks the children are encouraged to look for gnome-homes or evidence of gnomish passage. This is adorable.

CON:It’s very likely that the teacher actually believes the gnomes are real.

“Our lead kindergarten teacher is very upfront that she believes in gnomes,” responded [a Waldorf] parent. “Before their weekly walk in the forest, the kindergartens ask the gnomes (who, after all, live there) for permission to enter.”

“But do they really believe in gnomes?” persisted the first parent.

“Trust me, they believe it,” Diane Winters asserted. She’s a former Waldorf classroom aide in Philadelphia and now a vocal critic of Waldorf education because of her growing concerns with the schools’ philosophy.

“Do you believe in gnomes?” I asked Waldorf parent Leah Spilchen at an Ottawa Waldorf school open house last spring. “Yes, I do,” answered Spilchen unequivocally. “But I don’t believe that they would look like what we think of as gnomes because they are spirits, and we can’t see them.”

I received similar responses from the half-dozen other Waldorf supporters whom I queried on the topic. Ernst Von Bezold, who represents Waldorf schools on the board of directors for the Ontario Federation of Independent Schools, believes gnomes are “nature’s spirits” and says he is open to believing that some people have seen them. He claims he has seen angels.

“Steiner [Rudolph Steiner is the founder of Waldorf] taught that if you didn’t make spiritual progression over successive lifetimes, you come back as a gnome,” explains Philadelphia’s Diana Winters.

Source: http://www.religionnewsblog.com/1213

PRO:These Waldorf people are so nice.

CON:These Waldorf people are crazy.

Here’s the thing: Waldorf educators believe in almost everything I do when it comes to early education. An emphasis on free play, art and storytelling, and outdoor time—check. Simple but high-quality classroom materials—check. Child-led learning—well, not so much, because they have a secret agenda.

Their agenda is Anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner’s wacky religion. Anthroposophists believe that an evil entity called Ahriman is close to manifesting in the world (he can already influence it through television and other electronic devices). To fight Ahriman, humanity must be raised to its highest spiritual level—Anthroposophists believe that a person who is sufficiently spiritually developed can manifest psychic powers. As far as I can tell, Waldorf schools are kind of a secret training camp in this holy war, and their true purpose is to create psychic soldiers who will be able to fight Ahriman when the time comes.

Now, I frankly find this kind of awesome, but you can see how I’d be reluctant to hand a kid over to these people.

And the thing is, Waldorf educators will deny that anthroposophy forms a basis of the curriculum, but only because Steiner told them to say that.

[W]ith these things the outer form is of the utmost importance. Never call the verse a “prayer” but a “school opening verse.” Do see to it that people do not hear the expression “prayer” used by a teacher. This will go a long way towards overcoming the prejudice that this is an anthroposophical school.

We must worm our way through…[I]n order to do what we want to do, at least, it is necessary to talk with the people, not because we want to, but because we have to, and inwardly make fools of them.

Steiner, Rudolf (1920). Conferences with Teachers of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, 1919 to 1920, Volume One. Forest Row, East Sussex: Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications, 1986. Quotations sourced from waldorfcritics.org

So, okay. Waldorf is run by newage woo-woo types. Their intentions are good, and their methods are mostly good, but they actively seek to deceive parents about the occult basis of some of their pedagogy, which is double-plus ungood.

On the other hand, because they have a commitment to keeping this anthroposophy stuff secret, they also don’t foist it on the kids. All the kids know is that they’re supposed to make these shapes in the watercolor, or lift their arms in a certain way in the dance: they don’t have any idea that it’s because these exercises are supposed to unlock their latent psychic powers. Most Waldorf graduates come out of the school without any initiation into the occult basis of Steiner education, most go on to do well, and most look back fondly on their hippie-crunchy school experience. But some feel that they were harmed by the experience: “The effects of Waldorf’s educational program gradually accumulated in our heads and hearts. After I had been at the school only a few years, the notion of trying to see the world clearly had lost almost all meaning for me. Everything seemed to me symbolic rather than concrete—although what the symbols stood for was vague.”

Also, although I do believe that modern Waldorf schools, especially those in liberal cities like San Francisco, have mostly rid themselves of this baggage, Rudolph Steiner was very racist and there’s a lot of racism coded into anthroposophy.

All in all, I would consider Waldorf for preschool and maybe kindergarten, but no farther than that. I would ask a lot of questions of the teachers in the specific school I was considering. I would keep a very close eye on what kinds of things were going on the classroom. Waldorf schools do a lot of things right, and they actually seem to work pretty well—in terms of producing happy and successful adults, at least. Their success in producing psychic warriors seems minimal.

I should have mentioned that there are a few preschool to grade school options I find extremely tempting. For instance, the schools that offer language immersion programs in Spanish or in Mandarin. These are appealing because they take advantage of children’s amazing facility with language acquisition—an ability that drops off some time before puberty—and because they offer something I just can’t replicate at home. I’m quite confident in my ability to tutor Robin in early academics, and pretty confident that we can round out his social experiences through sports, art/music classes, and other kinds of group activities; but I can’t give him fluency in a second language. Even enrolling him in supplemental language classes wouldn’t begin to approach the benefits of immersion learning.

Unfortunately these language immersion schools are highly competitive, and getting Robin into one of them would require running the parental rat-race that I’m so keen to avoid. They’re also not cheap. San Francisco does have public elementary schools with immersion programs (Starr King is one), so if we’re still in the city when Robin’s ready for grade school we might try our chance in the lottery for a place at one of those. If we’re in Oakland, I’ll have to do some research to determine if there’s anything similar there.

The other preschool option I find tempting is the half-day, two day a week program at the San Francisco Waldorf School. (Oakland has a Waldorf school too.) Oh, but Waldorf—my conflicted take on Waldorf is going to require its own post.

So I’ve been meaning to post more about early education: it’s a keen interest of mine, since I’m still planning to homeschool Robin at least for the early years. I read most of what I can come across on the subject, but I haven’t written much about it since I’m arriving at my understanding in a scattershot fashion.

It doesn’t help that the science of early education is, as far as I can tell, in a very rudimentary state. There’s little consensus about even the most basic educational strategies. For example, some educators advocate early, intensively focused academic work, while others advocate introducing these subjects only to older children who will grasp them quickly. In America, the social consensus seems to mostly be swinging towards the first position: when it comes to school, more is better, and it can’t start too early.

The trend toward early testing and academic programs is typified by preschools that require IQ tests for entry: some in children as young as two years old. This world is probably craziest in New York—here’s an excellent article describing the lengths to which New York parents are going to groom their children for kindergarten admission tests—but San Francisco is not far behind. And the insanity does not begin with kindergarten. In the Bay Area, the elite preschools (oh yes, there are elite preschools) have waiting lists so long parents are signing up when their children are in utero. I have seen threads on local parenting forums debating which hospital parents should choose in order to maximize their chances of getting into these competitive preschools—which are, of course, so competitive only because they are “feeder schools” for the more exclusive private schools.

Anyway, most of the early-testing-and-rigorous-academics crowd call on Science to justify their programs. Testing is scientific (never mind the debate over IQ, and the question of whether administering constant tests to children has a negative affect on their educational outcomes). You even get annoying articles like this one, which uses the terms “neuroscience” and “cognitive science” liberally, even though the actual neuroscience in the piece is pretty much limited to a little sidebar graphic of the brain. Instead what the article is really about is the suggestion that kids who study math early—wait for it—improve in math. But this is in comparison to children in low-performing schools whose “classes devote mere minutes a day to math instruction or no time at all.” There’s no discussion of how the children who are put through abstract math drills in the early grades end up comparing to, say, children in a Montessori program whose introduction to mathematical concepts comes through directed, sensorial play, and who are encouraged to proceed at their own paces.

In the article we are also told that “schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class”: but we are not told the specifics of this program or any evidence that it may be effective. But, you know—it’s Science!

Robin is getting close to the age when other children will be starting preschool (most start admitting kids when they’re 2 and 9 months). I don’t want him to miss out by staying home, but I remain skeptical of the long-term benefits of early academic drilling. I think I’ve mentioned before that kids in Sweden don’t start primary school until age 7 (though younger children are guaranteed a place in public daycare), and even then the first year is devoted to socialization and play. The Swedes seem to turn out fine.

And call me paranoid, but I’ve come to believe that a lot of the emphasis on early education, universal pre-school, longer school years, and extra homework after school hours is a veiled attempt to get children—especially poorer children, and especially poorer non-white children—out of their parents’ hands as early as possible and for as long as possible, because the home environment is now assumed to be destructive. The research on preschool, for instance, indicates that it is far more beneficial for low-income children than for children from high-income homes. But at the same time, kids who spend a lot of time in schools and day care have a higher rate of behavioral problems than kids who get more family time.

I don’t doubt that kids who focus on academics early learn something from their study. I doubt whether those benefits persist over time, in comparison to children who come to the subject later but possibly better-equipped to handle the material. I doubt whether subjecting toddlers to a battery of tests is a good way to encourage enthusiastic learners and independent thinkers. And the only thing I’m sure of is that, for all the shouting about Science!, there really hasn’t been enough of it when it comes to early education.