Words Worth Reading

What is a “Waldorf School” (and why do we love it so much?)
Copyright (c) 2008 by Kenny Felder

In 1998, our oldest daughter was ready to enter kindergarten. I searched through alternatives to public education for my own children. The Friends’ School, Duke School for Children, Durham Academy…the list goes on, each with a wonderful philosophy and wonderful teachers to go with it. We investigated all of them, and ultimately wound up at the Emerson Waldorf School. I had never heard of a Waldorf School before.

In the following ten years, I have become passionate about Waldorf education. It has played a major role in the lives of all four of our children, both at school and at home. I encourage all parents who have access to a Waldorf school to seriously consider it for their children. More importantly, I encourage everyone involved in the public schools, especially at the lower levels, to study Waldorf pedagogy and take lessons from it, because I think it has the seeds of the reform that our schools so desperately need.

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Core Educational Standards for Young Children Grades K-3
The Alliance for Childhood

Young children “need to learn about families and communities, to take on challenges,and to develop social, emotional, problem-solving, self-regulation, and perspective-taking skills.”

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Skills at the Heart of Waldorf Education
By Sal Martino

Today we live in a world in which the vicissitudes of economic life are profoundly effecting the ways in which we work, play and relate to others.  Our communities are changing more rapidly than our capacity to adapt and acquire new skills and habits.

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Playtime Is Over

By David Elkind, The New York Times: March 26, 2010

Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew. Our young people are more aware of threats to the global environment than they are of the natural world in their own backyards.

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Today we live in a world in which the vicissitudes of economic life are profoundly effecting the ways in which we work, play and relate to others.  Our communities are changing more rapidly than our capacity to adapt and acquire new skills and habits.

The pentatonic scale…neuroscientific research.

Scholar’s School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate

By Sam Dillon, The New York Times: March 2, 2010

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling. Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical.

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Watch How You Hold That Crayon

By Peg Tyre, The New York Times: February 24, 2010

NOAH LASCANO, 8, had a problem: His teachers couldn’t read his handwriting. His homework became a frustrating exercise in writing once, and then, at the teacher’s request, writing again, just for legibility.

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