In this issue: Rudolf Steiner - Home Education Pioneer?
                   Letter written in response to the article on bullying in the July newsletter.

Rudolf Steiner – Home Education Pioneer?

Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian Philosopher who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century is remembered as the founder of the Waldorf school movement, but his ideas may be more applicable to the home than the classroom:

Rudolf Steiner presents something of an enigma. There are over eight hundred schools around the world that follow a Steiner method of education, which should be enough to make him regarded as the leading educationalist of the twentieth century, but his work is largely unknown outside the confines of the Steiner school movement and has had little impact on mainstream educational provision. 

This could be because his humane ideas are at odds with a system that involves taking children away from their homes and keeping them in schools for a large part of every day.

Rudolf Steiner himself seems to have developed his practical understanding of education by working as a private tutor for a boy who had special educational needs. He lived with the family, and dedicated himself full-time to the task that he had taken on – something that can readily be understood by parents who assume responsibility for their own children’s education.

He did not write about the experience, but when he was asked to be the advisor and guiding spirit behind a new school founded by his friend, Emil Molt, for the workers of his cigarette factory in Stuttgart, he had no hesitation in introducing a truly radical educational approach that had very little in common with the schools that were already in existence. Rudolf Steiner was able to justify each of his innovations on sound educational principles and predicted, with almost unfailing accuracy, the dire consequences that would result if conventional schools did not undergo a change of direction.

His first school was staffed by his hand-picked co-workers and could rely on his almost continual presence, but even so, he lamented that it frequently lapsed into the problems that habitually afflict school-based systems of education.

Nearly eighty years after his death and operating in a society in which schools have developed an almost total monopoly over education, it is not surprising that many modern Steiner schools seem, to the pupils who attend them, to differ from other schools more in name, than in practice. This does not negate the validity of their founder’s original ideas and their potential usefulness to home-educating families. The following is a personal assessment of some aspects of Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophy and how they may apply to parents dealing with modern problems.

Learning to Read
Rudolf Steiner expressed the belief that learning to read before the age of seven or eight can actually be harmful to a person’s long-term educational prospects.

This is a slightly disturbing idea for people who learnt to read when they were very young themselves, or who taught their own children to read when they were young, but it is very liberating if you have a child who does not want to read when they are five, six, seven, eight, or nine-years-old (and this is a very common experience in home-educating families). No matter what educational theorists might tell you, the success of Steiner schools over the past three quarters of a century clearly demonstrates that learning to read later rather than sooner, at the very least, does no long-term harm, and may, as Rudolf Steiner asserted, be beneficial.

The only reason for children being taught to read when they are young is that it helps them to get ahead in the school system.

Putting Children First
The apparently serious tone of Steiner’s lectures can serve to disguise the human warmth that he brought to his work. It is clear that he was much loved by the children who attended his school, and that they frequently brought their problems directly to him. He always took these problems seriously, raising them at staff meetings, and always placing the blame on the teachers concerned, never on the children. He was deeply shocked when a pupil was expelled from the school during his absence and is on record as saying that when irreconcilable difficulties develop between pupils and a teacher, then the teacher should leave. In a school, this is one of the most challenging aspects of his educational philosophy, but many home-educating parents find themselves naturally gravitating towards a situation in which they place the wishes of their children before everything else. It is reassuring that so eminent an educationalist as Rudolf Steiner should have regarded this as the right approach.

Educational Standards
Rudolf Steiner was the son of a country stationmaster, and although he attended a series of schools and universities, it is clear that he was a self-motivated and largely self-educated student. His intellectual achievements were prodigious; he could speak several languages, was an accomplished mathematician, and an architect, engineer, designer, writer, lecturer, and scholar of international repute. The pupils in his school were the children of semi-literate factory workers; they had just lived through the horrors of the First World War, and many were under-nourished, and had health problems. It never seems to have occurred to Rudolf Steiner, however, that these children should not be offered the chance to aim for the same educational standards that he had himself achieved, and he dedicated all his efforts to making this possible. Consequently, his school established a reputation not only for being humane, but also for its academic achievements. This can be taken as a source of inspiration to home-educating families who are often told that happiness and educational standards are incompatible.

Homework
Rudolf Steiner never lost sight of the fact that the children in his school had never chosen to go there. He therefore considered it to be an unjustifiable intrusion on their time to set them compulsory homework; if teachers could not do their work in the lesson time allotted to them, that was a shortcoming on their part, and the children should not be made to compensate for it by having to work at home.

He did not disapprove of children doing work at home – his commitment to academic excellence meant quite the reverse – he simply disapproved of their being made to do specific ‘homework’. His idea was that the teacher should be able to inspire the pupils so that they could then go off and study on their own. It would take an extraordinary teacher to make this work in a classroom, but in the home, it can fit into a natural rhythm of working. As a parent, you give what time you can, and if your child is interested in what you have been doing, they follow it up; they explain to you what they have found out, and you pick it up from there the next time you work together.

Main Lesson
When the first Steiner school opened it had a fairly conventional timetable with each class having a series of different lessons per day. It soon became apparent that the children were becoming confused by studying several subjects at the same time and Rudolf Steiner suggested that the timetable be changed, so that a class spent the first two hours of every day doing a ‘main lesson’. They would study the same subject in this time, each day, for three or four weeks and then move on to the next subject. This has been adopted as the standard timetable in nearly all Steiner schools and it is difficult to understand why it is not used in other schools. It allows a subject to be studied in much greater depth and gives children a chance to become really involved in the work that they are doing.

It is also ideal for home-educating families. Parents often only have time to sit down with their children for one or two hours per day, and sometimes parents have to take turns being at home with their children. Concentrating on one subject at a time prevents them from becoming overloaded and means that that one subject can be discussed on and off throughout the day. The experience of Steiner schools shows that this is not only more convenient than trying to tackle many subjects at the same time, but also more effective.

Crafts
Rudolf Steiner pointed out to the teachers in his school that a real craftsperson would never work on a craft project for isolated periods of time. As an example he asked them to consider how frustrating it must be for a child to pick up a piece of knitting, to work on it for half an hour, and then just as everything was going well, to have to put it to one side until the following week. Such a system could almost have been designed to put people off practical work of any kind.

This difficulty proved impossible to overcome within the confines of a school timetable, but in the home there is no reason why a child should not work at a craft project continuously until it is completed, with all other work being put to one side.

Qualifications
Rudolf Steiner never disguised the low opinion he held of the of the qualifications awarded by the educational institutions of his time, but he considered that freedom of choice should be one of the benefits that accrued from a real education. He therefore went to extreme lengths to try to ensure that the children who graduated from his school were as qualified to enter the mainstream education system, as they were to follow an alternative course. In order to do this, he added an extra year to his curriculum so that the oldest pupils could work for the state exams with the help of their school teachers and, at the same time, he tried to found his own institution of higher education, which the school graduates could attend if they preferred. Unfortunately, he died before this project could be completed.

This issue may prove to be one that home educators find relatively easy to resolve: hopefully, home-educated children should have little difficulty in passing entrance exams required by universities, but if they prefer to continue studying and working from home, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.

Conclusion
Rudolf Steiner does not appear to have ever tried to establish a particular educational philosophy, he simply sought to discover the methods most appropriate to the children in his care. He would probably be horrified to learn that such phrases as ‘Steiner education’ or ‘Steiner school’ could ever have come into existence.

It is therefore consistent with his work, not to adopt a ‘Steiner’ approach to education, but instead to learn from his ideas and to apply them in so far as they are applicable to a particular child in a particular situation. For the modern home educator, one of the greatest sources of comfort that his example provides, is that he flew in the face of all the advice given by the educational establishment, and was still, in the end, proved to be in the right.

My Personal Experience of Rudolf Steiner’s Work
I first came across the work of Rudolf Steiner when I was at university, studying plant science. I became interested in organic techniques of agriculture and was intrigued that an Austrian Philoso­pher, Rudolf Steiner, had pioneered a form of organic agriculture, known as Biodynamic Farming, in the 1920s. I was puzzled that such an influential figure in the organic movement, should receive so little recognition either in academic circles (I had to travel to London to visit a private library in order to pursue my research), or amongst environ­mental campaigners, and was even more surprised to discover that the same Rudolf Steiner was responsible for the ‘Waldorf’ or ‘Steiner’ system of education.
When I had children of my own, they started to attend the local Steiner school, and when the school experienced staff short­ages, I worked there as a maths and science teacher for two years. This enabled me to became more familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas.
Since we started to home educate, we have never tried to follow any particular educational philosophy, but have found many of Rudolf Steiner’s ideas helpful and insightful, often providing a solid alternative to conventional techniques when some sort of new approach is needed. Consequently, I have retained a feeling of respect for this remarkable man, and would still like to see his work taken more seriously by the world at large.

Letters

Bullying

The following letter from Angie Cox, promoted by the July issue of the newsletter, is reprinted in full because it highlights a situation that is easily recognisable to people who have worked within the education system, but which is not often acknowledged in the media.

A subject rather too close to my heart. I had my daughter rather late (35) and she grew up in our rather quiet household happily for her first years. As she got to two, pressure was being put on me to take her to toddler groups (mainly by neighbours and some relations). I gave this a try and found she didn't really seem to enjoy it, she was always very quiet and would sit and concentrate on a book or game. As most of the other children ran around her or hung off apparatus she got alarmed. I managed to take her to more than one group but she didn't really like them, the last one was fairly happy as they provided quiet library type areas. At home we read, painted, played games together and were happy. The outside world still seemed alarmed that she didn't mix enough. Playing with one or two other children was not a problem. I was then encouraged (it felt more like threatened ..ideas that I was failing as a mother) to sign her up for the nursery attached to our local school. Our first day was "interesting" with a huge fuss being made of who owned my daughter's coat. It had fallen off a peg and the teacher who picked it up seemed to think it "didn't belong". I hadn't realised what she meant until home-time when the other kids put on their dirty passed-down coats. I made a note to get her a more "normal" jacket ..sadly I never learnt not to wash it. I come from a family who had hand-me-downs but I have to say they were washed by a mother with no washing machine (she still won't have one at 83). Holly was always frightened by the level of violence and noise, the teachers bellowed at the top of their voices most of the time. I volunteered in another class but went home with a head-ache most days. A lot of the children were under-nourished, had black teeth and were frantic in behaviour. I was saddened that many only knew one or two words at the age of 3 and 4. There was a lot of ill-feeling in the local community over a high proportion of the kids being from Pakistani families. I found the kids to be happier, well-fed and bright. Even those who spoke no English soon started to, and I'd just chat to them in English. Two years at nursery were a fairly miserable experience for Holly but I thought it "must be best".

When she started at the attached school her first memory was of having her dinner-money forcibly taken and of being bellowed at on the first day after the fire-alarm had gone off and the kids were pretty much left to run out in a disorganised rabble. I started noticing that she was trying to let out her feelings when she was playing in her sand-pit ..she'd tell me about the "mugging". I talked to her teacher about it and was told the child in question had a lot of problems. She continued to take every opportunity to pick on my daughter. I started to do a day per week reading help and got to know a few of the children. We rarely got to do much reading as my role became more that of a social-worker and had to listen to some very distressing stories of home lives. I had an alcoholic father myself but a coping mother. Many of these children had alcoholic mothers, with abusive boyfriends, to cope with. One of these boyfriends had come home with a gun ..that little girl started having severe panic-attacks. The teachers all seemed in a state of exhausted oblivion. My daughter’s teacher had a coping mechanism of taking aspirin and peering into her bag for ages. The furniture flew often, one little boy would poke at faces with sharp pencils. In another class my daughter was terrified by a teacher who bellowed all day, she was learning nothing we hadn't taught her ourselves.

Then she found herself in a class where the biggest bully was the teacher herself. Nothing that happened to Holly was ever taken seriously, stabbing with pens, pushed downstairs, name calling (she is Anglo/West-Indian). It got worse and then when a Pakistani boy started to really hurt her the head-mistress told me "it's the culture, you should get used to it". I was furious, this was an insult to the Pakistani community. I haven't seen any evidence that violence is any more tolerated than by any other culture. That was the head of a school with the highest percentage of kids from the Pakistani community. I am an attender at Quaker meetings so can never advocate "hitting back" ..the only advice anyone had. I did what I had to do and I am very lucky as I can afford to stay home. It means going without a car or holidays but my daughter only has one life, one childhood and it is the most precious thing in the world. It has been nearly 5 years now and sometimes a struggle but this wonderful site has taught me so much, above all not to worry.

            Thank you,
            Angela, Jeff and Holly Cox.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 This newsletter is edited by Gareth Lewis, author of One-to-One, A Practical Guide to Learning at Home

Questions and comments: garethlewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk

© 2003 freedom-in-education     http://www.freedom-in-education.co.uk