Reluctantly, Joyfully, Waldorf
Two years ago- which is to say two open-enrollment periods ago, I became a bona fide hand wringer as my husband and I weighed our options for entering our son into kindergarten. I remember concertedly trying to play Jedi mind tricks on myself. “Train your mind not to think about it,” I told myself, “Worrying does not make choices more clear, and it has no power to move anyone’s name to the top of an open-enrollment lottery.” Spoiler alert: I am no Jedi. I’m a mere mom, and I am entirely grateful that the spring of indecision is behind me. In the end, we chose to direct our feet down our least anticipated path. It has yielded the most surprising results:
Even for a family that doesn’t smell like patchouli and carrots, Waldorf is awesome.
There are about a hundred disclaimers to address before I go any further. First of all, I am a teacher, and I think traditional school is great. (Which is fortunate, since I teach in a traditional school, and the majority of our country’s children attend traditional schools.) I continually work with and meet fellow educators in my public school district whose thoughtfulness, talent, and outright love for their students could move mountains.
Secondly, there is a world of questions when considering sending your kid to anything other than her neighborhood public school. On the one hand, specialized schools can offer exceptional opportunities. On the other hand, certain tax dollars follow children to their new “choice” school and away from their neighborhood school. School choice also factors into increasing an already alarming trend of school segregation. In other words, if your neighborhood school is struggling for healthy diversity and adequate funding, sending kids to a school of choice (even a gloriously hippie Waldorf charter) can exacerbate the local challenges of the community you live in. This isn’t merely esoteric for my city; the elementary schools in Napa tend towards student enrollments that are lopsided by socioeconomic status and home language. Though our city parks and grocery stores reflect diverse backgrounds, our elementary schools are not as heterogeneous.
I know too that there is plenty of evidence suggesting that charter schools- Waldorf or otherwise- aren’t in and of themselves monumental catalysts of student learning. There are so many factors that affect student success, and those factors can exist in any school and any household; they are not beholden to special schools that break with tradition.
Also, I can’t ignore that we are only two years in. The magic and wonder I witness as a kindergarten mom might look like naivete by the time I’m a sixth grade mom. But I hope it doesn’t, because so far things are singing.
And by singing, I mean the feathery sound of my son’s high-pitched little voice singing rhymes as he plays with his legos. Also I mean the ridiculously sweet ritual of his singing a blessing over our meal. He never seemed to mention it his first year of kindergarten (more on that later), but this year he asks the whole family to sing a little earth-loving prayer over our dinners a few times a week. It’s not just that there are songs in my son’s daily schooling, but it’s how the songs are sung: softly, sweetly, like a dream. Older students at his school learn to sing with gusto for the plays they put on throughout they year.
There is nothing to be proven in the kindergarten singing, however, save for the sweetness of song itself.
Even the teachers sing with a whispery-soft voice, gently calling the class to line up in the play yard or move from free play into snack time. In Waldorf kindergarten my son has learned song as a language for telling stories, inviting play, invoking gratitude, and simply passing the time.
Not just fluff: hand stitching gnomes improves eye-hand coordination, fine motor skills, and imaginative play. Also, the gnomes hurt way less than legos when you step on them.
Though my son has learned to love songs in his kindergarten, the greater gift he has received is a profound capacity for silence. It’s not an empty silence; he loves to be very quiet and listen. When we’re with big groups of kids lately, he craves a spell of quiet time before the noisy chaos of kids running and jumping sets in. Likewise, he sometimes requests whispering lunches and quiet car rides. Some of his preference for hermit-like silence is due to personality, but I also notice that there are spaces and time that honor quiet in his Waldorf school day. His after school care has a Quiet Room where children go to curl up on the floor, or the corner, or in the rocking chair with any of the books that line the walls. Last week, I accidentally walked into the kinder classroom during circle time and felt like I had stumbled upon a coven of fairies in the wood. Twenty-plus kindergartners were holding hands and skipping in a circle, singing a cotton-soft song. What made the space feel a little magical was that despite dozens of feet lifting and hitting the floor, hardly anything except the song was audible.
The children wear slippers inside their carpeted classroom, and the bouncing bodies without percussion was downright ephemeral.
It immediately felt sacred, similar to the whole-being reverence I’ve felt in old churches. I’ve also seen his teacher begin her puppet shows in a volume so soft, every person in the room goes still and leans in to hear. It’s a commanding quiet.
If a reverence for quiet is the ying of Waldorf, playing hard is the yang. I have a theory that the near-mystical quiet spaces are only made possible by the gigantic, full-body play that is also encouraged. My son and his friends begin every day, rain or shine, running, climbing, jumping, shoveling, and hula-hooping. If ice forms in the play yard flat wagons, the kids make a game of trying to break the ice with sticks. If there are puddles, the children put on their rain gear and splash as high as they can. It’s reminiscent of the attitude Anu Partanen describes in The Nordic Theory of Everything: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” In our nearly two years of Waldorf kindergarten, we have not once felt like we needed to give our son time to burn off energy after school. On the contrary, playing hard is what he learns to do at school.
And have I mentioned the soup yet?
My son, my normal American six year-old boy who loves macaroni and cheese out of a box, has also learned to love vegetables in his stint as a Waldorf kindergartener. And not just any vegetables. Kale! Potatoes! Savory, oniony, celery-clad vegetable soup! If there is ever a testament to peer pressure, this is it. Every Tuesday, the children bring a vegetable (Even the gross ones. Turnips, folks.) to class. Then the kindergarteners cut the vegetables, with real knives. By midmorning Thursday, my son is gobbling up homemade vegetable soup with his classmates and politely asking for seconds. Because nibbling at kale on the playground, and savoring every last drop of soup is the cool thing to do. Drop the wooden, media-free, imaginary mike.
I must also mention the primary reason we considered a Waldorf education in the first place. Besides the playing and the vegetables and whatnot, Waldorf offers two years of kindergarten for those who need it. My son, who was born two weeks too early for our district’s transitional kindergarten, is also incredibly small for his age and could not be more disinterested in letters and numbers. Sending him to a full-fledged kindergarten two Augusts ago felt obscenely inappropriate. Well-meaning family members and friends assured us that even if he started out on the immature side, he’d catch up eventually.
School has always come easily for my husband and I, so until it was our son’s turn, we hadn’t thought to question the system. All the same, there we were two years ago, suddenly confronted with the fact that the system was poised to make our child’s first crucial years in school a struggle rather than a joy. I was also reading Sir Ken Robinson’s book Creative Schools at the time, which is among many publications that wag a finger at our school system’s industrial roots. One of Robinson’s criticisms regards our strict age boundaries, when children may have above-their-age abilities in some areas, and below-average abilities in others:
The principle of linearity works well for manufacturing; it doesn’t for people. Educating children by age group assumes that the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. In practice, different students learn at different rates in different disciplines… We don’t apply this batching principle outside of schools. We don’t keep all the ten-year-olds away from the nine year-olds, in separate facilities. This segregation mainly happens in schools.
On paper, our son was a perfect candidate for kindergarten. He was the right age, had two college-educated parents, and a hearty exposure to preschool. In the flesh, however, our playful, well-behaved, tiny, inquisitive child got frustrated when he tried to hold a crayon and saw no need to connect letters to the sounds they make. He was- and is- more comfortable in the dirt than in a chair. This is not two affluent parents trying to make excuses for their extra special child. It’s just a reckoning with a system that didn’t seem built to nurture a child who needed more time. And so, when we learned that our local Waldorf charter offered one- and two-year kindergartens, we started to pay attention.
I am so glad that we did. We might be an unlikely Waldorf family, in that it took me a year to know what to do with the beeswax my son occasionally brought home from school. (You run it under hot water until it gets pliable.) And though we reserve TV for a weekends-only treat, my son can name every series in the Power Rangers franchise by heart. If we need to sum up why our child doesn’t know sight words yet, we mention how much we love his “hippie school” and how skilled he is at pouring water and stitching gnome puppets. We laugh, because it is so different from the schooling we excelled in as children, and it is nothing we had considered in the early years of our son’s life. But two years in, we are relishing the joie de vivre that our son has found inseparable from school. We don’t keep a lick of patchouli in the house, and I’ve never lacto-fermented my own carrots. (I do, however, know moms now that could guide me in the use of either one.) It turns out, Waldorf has room for families like ours too- as long as we make room for the unconventional ourselves. We’re on a path we hadn’t planned upon, and the journey is muddy and sweet.
