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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year.

I have a middle-schooler who, last year, was in a homeschool pod with, sort of accidentally, a lot of vaccine-wary Waldorf-defectors. They did the walk/bike to a park almost every day. We pulled her out of that pod this year because the plan was to spend essentially all day every day in the forest. The only math that was on the curriculum was in the spring when it was needed to plot out and build a big garden. All the reading was going to be nature-related non-fiction. No history at all. There's probably a healthy balance between intellectual and practical education, but it's easy to go too far in one direction.

Yes, the Waldorf style of education wherein there is a lot of walking in parks and very little actual education is fine for a five-year-old who basically just needs babysitting, but becomes more problematic for older kids who are actually capable of non-trivial learning.

Because of the risk of stunting children's intellectual development, I wouldn't recommend either for children old enough to attend primary school, but if you must, choose Montessori over Waldorf. Montessori is basically Waldorf without the bizarre pseudoscientific religion and occult agriculture.

Yes, that seems likely. I dropped an application to teach at a school like that once, because it involved a lot of storytelling and very little income.

I was homeschooled, and for several years my study of math consisted of being given a math textbook (not even Khan academy lessons or something!) and asked to study it. I was in my mid twenties when I realized that I wasn't just unusually bad at math, and that I probably could have gone into something tech adjacent if I had taken actual classes.

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