Speaking of Diana’s comment the other day.
On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.
This is from an article in New York Times about parents who work in the technology industry and send their children to waldorf school. It also has other strange pieces of information:
Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.
Can? It always does. Oh, and what about the ‘nondenominational emphasis on the divine’? But, well, does the knitting work then?
Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades.
Upon being told by AWSNA that waldorf students go on to higher education at prestigeous universities (what’s the reliability of AWSNA’s research into this — anyone knows?), NYT correctly observes:
Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors.
Further down the article continues:
And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?
“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”
No, there’s no reason why they can’t figure that stuff out when they’re older. It’s much worse to delay the teaching of reading, writing, maths and so forth. Understanding science is not like learning to use toothpaste if you have not learnt how to read properly first. The thing is, as one waldorf official admits, these students home environments compensate for the elements that are lacking in the education:
the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.
A waldorf student says:
“Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”
And children who spend less time copying handwriting from the blackboard would have a problem doing that?