Reflections on coming from Waldorf to Unschooling--technology; media; "screen time"

This post contains musings about the perspectives I've been working within, around, in between, as I transition from Waldorf education enthusiast and parent to Unschooling parent. A lot of the musing has to do with electronic media, which is arguably the most difficult perspective to shift coming from a Waldorf school.

 I'll start with a summary of my own upbringing as a Waldorf student in grade school. There was much talk and "wisdom" shared in our community that limited any sort of electronic media--at that time it was namely TV (and the ads that come with it) and movies, because we didn't have a family computer until I was 15 and I did not have access to the World Wide Web until I was in college. From my earliest memories I was only allowed to watch the Educational/Community channel, and I did watch a lot of Sesame Street and Mr. Rodgers. My experiences of those shows from when I was a small child is so vibrant and warm in my mind. When I got older we were allowed to watch one 30-mintute show per day, and then when shows were lengthened to an hour it became one hour total per day. However. If I went to the home of a friend who was allowed to watch as much TV as they liked then that's all I wanted to do--I would beg or manipulate my friends into watching movies or TV as much as possible. At our house, every time my parents were busy outside or when I was alone in the house, my sister and I would go into our living-room and watch TV--whatever we could find of interest on the 13 broadcast channels we had available. If my parents came home or came into the room before we could get out we would quickly change the channel to the Education channel because we knew we would be in less trouble watching that than other channels. When I got older I used to think back on this practice as "being sneaky" which I suppose it was, but through the lens of Unschooling and after reading a couple of books by John Holt I now see how adaptable and enterprising and insatiable I was at gaining access to this fascinating means to experiencing the world. My sister and I discussed it as teenagers and SWORE that we would allow our kids to watch TV freely so that they weren't so starved for it and captivated by it like we were.

 When my first-born, my son, was small some friends got us Baby Einstein videos and by the time he was one year old I would put that on to help get time to shower, clean, do laundry, etc. When he was two I started working part-time from home at two-and-a-half his little sister was born and so he watched more and more TV. Around the time he was three, all of his friends were going to preschool and I knew that neither he nor I was ready for that so I started researching and decided to pursue Waldorf edcuation for him, starting with our Waldorf at home. We decided to go cold-turkey without "tuvie," and spent many hours at parks and play dates and museums to keep busy until eventually we just didn't turn on the TV anymore. I noticed that my son played more, and when his sister was old enough she also played with or without someone else participating.

 Throughout their years at Waldorf school I supported low-media lifestyle, but I see the reasoning with new eyes today. The reason that I ALWAYS gave people was that it let them engage with each other and friends in a more organic way without influences from sources outside of their day-to-day life. Beauty in simplicity is a strong theme I found at our Waldorf schools. I worked and volunteered many hours at our Waldorf schools and I noticed that the children who watched a lot of TV or movies, and later in video games, talked a lot about what they were seeing and experiencing when they came to school. Of course the children always process their experiences in a myriad of ways, even bringing home stories and songs and bits of information from school. But from the school's perspective (and mine, as a tuition-paying parent,) most topics encountered in media weren't relevant at school and were distractions from the curriculum presented at school. There is another perspective in Waldorf education that centers around rounded and experiential learning. For example, a student learns about numbers by collecting something that occurs in abundance in the local natural environment, like acorns in the Sierra Foothills of CA. They sort and place acorns in bags to represent place value. They hear stories about numbers and learn to move their bodies and catch balls in patterns to support their full-body experience of numbers and patterns. Another example is the learning about space. In a Waldorf school the teaching progresses in alignment with human experience and learning. Noticing with their feet planted firmly on the ground everything that man might have noticed a thousand years ago - and building on this experience; layering new knowledge and awareness and perspective as the children grow older and their minds typically more able to work with abstract concepts.

 Just in writing this piece it has become clear to be that any educational path is a choice, and ideally it's a conscious one. I have loved the fluid, graceful, beautiful, and thoughtful way that Waldorf brings children into their world. And yet, at its foundation it is a choice of prescription, just a different perscription developed initially by a man who spent his entire life considering human beings and our relationship to each other and our world--spiritual, physical, and metaphysical. And later developed by others who similarly had the idea of a peaceful and happy society operating from an enlightened perspective out of love, empathy, and conscious thought around all actions and experiences. I don't know how things would be different had I known about Unschooling when my children were small... and as this type of thought or regret goes I know that we have learned and grown so much from our Waldorf experience, so much that I don't know who or where we would be now without it! But the more we get into the flow of our natural-learning and life the more I wish I had.known.

A journey through Waldorf and into Unschooling - what we've been doing the last ten years

I started this blog ten years ago when all of my son's friends were heading to preschool at the age of three. I knew he wasn't ready for that and I wasn't ready either, so we decided to do our own preschool routine at home and spent several months enjoying a warm and sweet rhythm.

 Within that first year of Waldorf home preschool we discovered a Waldorf-inspired preschool in our area... and a couple of years later decided to move away from that area because there wasn't a true Waldorf school there.

 We spent eight years happily at two different Waldorf schools and I believed that we would stay with this mode of education through high school. We even moved from CA to OR, in large part in order to let the kids attend a Waldorf school that goes through 12th grade.

 I spent the last decade volunteering 20+ hours per week in committee work, serving on the Board of Trustees, Parent Council, and a myriad of other working committees to support the structure and work of two Waldorf schools and it was SO very fulfilling. I grew as an individual in wisdom and inner strength, and all of it supported growth in my paid/professional career as well. The kids seemed to do well in the beginning with Waldorf and of course I appreciated the beauty and intention in the curriculum, but as we got into the grades I started to notice signs of stress in each child.

 Molly was the model student - her work and behavior were held as models for the class and for visiting teachers. She would come home EXHAUSTED and prone to huge emotions which I still believe were due to the immense amount of effort that she put into holding herself up at school. She is a perfectionist and it causes her stress when she isn't "doing it right" from the very first. And in school there is a LOT to get right; a lot of external expectation and thus she self-imposed all of that expectation and more on herself.

 Dylan is a dreamy young person. He loved the stories and loved being with other kids with time to play. But his focus is his own and while he spent two hours at home one day building an airplane from a shoe box and hand-helicopter, he would spend most of his classroom time staring out the window. We finally hit our limit when he entered 6th grade and the school he attended implemented special Math classes four days per week. The Math classes included daily homework. We worked diligently and patiently at home with Dylan to support his successful completion of the homework. He spent many nights crying and lying on the floor in agony over the stress of focusing on numbers on paper. Each day he needed to re-remember the steps and processes. Each day it was brand new. And each day he struggled. We did get to a point where we were caught up with the homework but then received an email from the class teacher--she had evaluated each student's math skills and sent home a packet of work that represented the amount of practice and "catch up" that they needed on skills. Dylan's packet was an inch thick. It was then that I realized that we were going about this all wrong.

 My whole goal for my children's lives is for them to become who they are--who they're meant to be. This means supporting them where they are and allowing them to explore while finding what they love and what "feeds" them as individuals. I finally realized that school no longer was supporting that goal. I started to think about homeschooling again. And in researching homeschool ideas that support natural and life learning I was reintroduced to Unschooling. I first heard of Unschooling from my Mom, who clearly thought the whole idea was nuts. My cousin was unschooling her three (maybe already four at that time) children and she spent time doing outdoorsy things and reading to them... just living life. Because it was presented to me as crazy, I honestly didn't even try to get it at that time...and we were already started on our Waldorf path so. Now we've come back to it and I started to read. And learn. And my mind opened. And I listened to The Unschooling Life Podcast that broke down all the principals, and I cried through many of them at the time lost and at my own experiences as a child. And I joined the Facebook group, Radical Unschooling Info and our local Portland Unschoolers... and breathed. I talked to the family about homeschooling after a WONderful holiday break in late 2015 and everyone was on board. And so it began.

 *pre-dated to reflect the time I wrote this post.*

Waldorf and Unschooling: noticing similar goals and philosophies...

I've been doing a lot of reading about unschooling lately, because I'm sure it's the way for us to go for our family in terms of learning. It feels familiar and rings true to my own beliefs about education and life--that it's best when created in freedom, and in the context of the family's current time and place. I've studied enough Anthroposophy and Waldorf philosophy to know that I believe in its principles--more on those below. And so, when I came upon unschooling and started to read, the concepts described and challenges that we've been having seemed to align with the benefits gained by unschooling while also meeting the needs of my children.

 The goal of Waldorf education is, in the most simple of words, to create happy people. In more words, it's to support children into becoming happy adults who know themselves and their own value in this world--and who are interested in their own world and the people in it, and thus they care for others and the earth with love and consciousness. This philosophy is the means to the ultimate goal, which is to further social renewal--to create a society that will be peaceful, and to create systems that support people and the natural world as opposed to teaching/forcing people into systems in order to support the system itself.

 On to the philosophy of unschooling which, as I've read it in several places, is the following: to help a child be who she is and blossom into who she will become. Unfortunately that will be my only direct comment about unschooling because I'm not experienced enough yet to give any opinion about how this is accomplished in-practice. But this desciption of the unschool philosophy goes to the heart of Waldorf philosophy. In Waldorf education, children are respected for themselves as well as for their potential as human beings. While guided by adults, one of the things that people notice first about Waldorf students is their ability to look adults in the eye and be confident in their communication. I believe this is because the teacher knows the students so well, and practices conscious ways of connecting with them on a daily basis. It's part of the Waldorf teacher's job to help discover where a child shines and where challenging him would help him know himself and the world around him; to help her learn about culture and history in a way that speaks to their inner being as developing humans while showing where we've been in a holistic way; to explore the world with children both in the classroom and out. In unschooling it's the parent's job to support the child's becoming. The other difference is more inferred from the description of the goals described above. Unschooling focuses on the child's experience of the world and herself as the means toward being happy, while Waldorf, also interested in the child's experience of the world and herself as the means to being happy, does this with a greater explicit goal for a community that cares for others and works together in a global community for peace and care of the Earth, our home.

 As a mother, I'm most interested in my child's future life and believe that's my job to care for it as much as possible. I see the years of their childhood as fleeting and want to foster the best possible relationship for them with themselves and due to our proximity, their parents. There is little that I can do directly to affect the fate of the world, but by doing my small part to help my own children with their relationship to and within it, I believe that they will be more open to the care of others. I think that this is implied by the goals for unschooling--happy people tend to have room in their hearts to care about others and be interested in the world around them. At the least, I'm willing to bet that this connection with the world is a side-effect of unschooling even if it never enters the parent's mind to value this for their child.

 Found quotes:

 "...Waldorf Method of Education strives to awaken and ennoble capabilities, rather than to merely impose intellectual content on the child. Learning becomes much more than the acquisition of quantities of information... learning becomes an engaging voyage of discovery of the world, and of oneself.

 Steiner maintained that the materialism underlying modern life was disastrous. He urged his followers to awaken to the spiritual origin of nature and destiny of the human being...A Waldorf Education is meant to be the beginning of a life long love of learning."

 ~WaldorfHomeschool.com --

Revival

And ten years later, we're back where we started. I've had two kids attending Waldorf school for ten years now and recently decided to bring them home. We did not make the decision lightly or for one reason. The most important reasons are a) the kids asked for it, and b) it's what feels right for our family. I believe that recognizing when you need a change and constantly being aware of what brings you joy, interest, and a feeling that you're useful. That's really the fundamental goal for Waldorf education, as a part of the movement toward social renewal - developing in children (people) the deep knowledge of how to live a happy life. Life, love, interests and happiness are all ever-changing. And here we are again.