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.
