The Different Schools

Austrian Rudolf Steiner was a ‘thinker’ who lived from 1861 to 1925. The schools he invented have been spread around the world by parents who are looking for a more holistic alternative to state education.

New Zealand has several Rudolf Steiner schools. Harald Breiding-Buss sums up what they do.

Choosing the right school can cause quite a bit of anxiety amongst parents, and even after the decision is made you’ll keep asking yourself if it was the best one.

As a result, children get transferred between schools quite a bit for no other reason than the parents looking for better teachers, better quality education, or better peers.

One choice available in a number of places is Rudolf Steiner schools. The larger ones, such as in Christchurch or Hastings, go all the way from Kindergarten to High School, and this kind of stability is part of the Steiner mission.

Rudolf Steiner himself was a bit of an oddball who lived in the late 1800s/early 1900s, espousing anthroposophical theory. Much of his thinking was a response to the wave of Darwinism sweeping over Europe at the time, which eventually led to ideas of racial superiority in his native Austria and Germany. Steiner insisted that there is a fundamental difference between people and animals, and therefore people can’t be reduced to the level of biology only.

He went on to develop theories about the spiritual development of humans and started his first school in 1914 or so, ironically sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Waldorf. Steiner schools are still known as Waldorf schools in many places.

Most of Steiner’s theories are a bit hard to swallow. They involve clairvoyance, astral bodies and other meta-physical items generally associated with fringe elements of society.

However, most Steiner schools in New Zealand have become quite mainstream and as a result have been overrun by parents simply looking for a friendlier, less competitive alternative to a state school. While technically private schools, they run an integrated curriculum, are subject to inspections and reviews by the Educational Review Office, and governed by an elected Board of Trustees, like any other school.

Steiner schools try to teach according to a child’s developmental stage (as identified by Rudolf Steiner). Formal schooling does not begin until the child is 6 (although the Steiner Kindergartens get school funding from age 5) and literacy is not taught very intensively for the first year. Recovery programmes are not available before age 9.

Homework is generally not set until class 5 (year 6), and then only in moderation.

The schools set big store in the teaching environment, and you will find the most thought-out and friendliest buildings and classrooms here. They try to avoid right angles, so buildings might be hexagonal or so.

There is usually lots of natural light in the classrooms and natural materials are used wherever possible. You may find old-fashioned blackboards with in-folding side-panels and multi-colour chalk bits, but certainly no computers in the first few years.

The schools’ ideal is that classes stay with the same teacher throughout primary/intermediary school level, although in practice that rarely happens. But developing a relationship between teachers and students is considered rather important. Children are personally greeted by the teacher as they come in the morning, and each gets a handshake when leaving.

The class as such is also kept stable as much as possible. Unlike in state schools, where children start at their fifth birthday, all Steiner students start school at the same time after the summer holidays, and many would already know each other from kindergarten.

The schools also try hard to draw in the parents, not just to help the schools with work and money, but to make sure they network with one another. Parent evenings are scheduled at least three times a year, and social get-togethers between class parents are actively encouraged.

Establishing a relationship with other parents comes in especially useful when the children grow into teenagers. If, by then, enough trust has developed between parents, it avoids a lot of potential minefields.

The slower start academically makes it difficult to change schools at first, but by year 6 or 7 children seem to have fully caught up. The Steiner curriculum relies heavily on art, or visual concepts in general, and also on project work.

Teaching is structured around ‘main lessons’, where a subject is explored in depth for 5-6 weeks for 2-3 hours every morning. Generally students are asked to produce a book for each main lesson, which will contain lots of drawings as well as the subject text. You won’t find photocopied colour-in sheets glued into them.

Steiner schools also teach the ‘old skills’, such as handwork or woodwork, and both are taught to either sex. Students are not forbidden to climb the trees on the school grounds, and can even make swords out of wood or cardboard during school time (although I think they draw the line at guns). Generally, there’s also a better gender mix amongst the teachers than in state schools.

There are no school uniforms (it runs contrary to Steiner’s belief in treating people as individuals), although for the lower school (up until year there is a dress code which includes a prohibition on obvious labels such as Nike or Disney, all jewelry (even inconspicuous earrings), and ‘loud’ messages on T-Shirts.
By the time the kids reach High School level (called ‘upper school’) the teaching format is much more similar to a mainstream school.

Teaching is divided into subjects, with a variety of teachers, although there are still main lessons offering more focus. As with any other school, the teaching standard and success depends a lot on the individual teachers as well as how much disruptive behaviour they have to deal with in any particular class.

Steiner schools tend to draw from more middle-class families, but they like their classes big: 30 children each. According to their philosophy that is desirable to ensure all the personality types are adequately represented, but it is a big handful for a teacher to control.

All Steiner schools teach Eurythmy, which is considered a core part of a Steiner education. It is a form of movement or form dance (Steiner himself described it as an art – he didn’t invent it), supposedly helping the spirit to express itself, but in practice often causing quite negative expressions from the students – it is wildly unpopular, but at least doesn’t seem to do them any harm.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Steiner schools to me is that they have so little interest in sports and PE. Rudolf Steiner himself didn’t seem to like sports at all. In one of his speeches he indicated that he thought sports reduces your spirit back to the level of an animal.

His schools mostly seem to have gotten over it and they participate in the usual athletics competitions and provide a modest amount of PE (the North Island schools even get their year 6 classes together for something like an ‘Olympics’ event).

However, in Christchurch at least, any structured coaching in any sports type is a rarity and more often than not seems to happen in the PE teacher’s own time (sometimes in the lunch break).

Would I recommend them? I think the positives outweigh the negatives much more so than in most schools I’ve seen, and their methods of teaching make a lot of sense to me. However, if you run into problems you’ll probably find that Steiner schools are even less willing to acknowledge them (and do something about them) than your average state school.

You may also have to put up with less-than-enthusiastic attitudes to immunisation, and other pet-hates of the more alternative sector of society but, on the up-side, 10 year old girls in the school still seem to be able to communicate without cellphones.

Next: Dating Dads

Young Musicians

Encouraging your child to learn an instrument is one thing—pushing them to perform on one quite another. But where is the boundary between bringing out a child’s natural talent and asking them to do something they may not really enjoy? Kevin Albertson thought about what he wants for his own son.
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Father & Child Magazine Issue #43

Parenting: The Teenage Mind; From The Archives: Hungry Fro Dad; The Mother Myth; 100 Days; A Lifeline For Babies; A Vision For Boys; Book Review: Fatherhood Hands-On
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Trouble at School

While all children and young adults are better educated than ever before, there is a widening gap between boys and girls.

Has removing barriers to girls’ education led to increased barriers for boys education? Or are girls just naturally smarter than boys? Brendon Smith investigates.

I always thought our local kindergarten was a wonderful place. It had lovely woman teachers and a large sunny playground. I was always happy to help them put the lid on the big sandpit, pick up tools by the workbench, listen from the back corner as the last mat-time story was read aloud.

Occasionally the kids would crash a trolley and I’d get an incident report, but I figured that was a sign of progressive risk taking, a good trait for 4 year-old boys, surely.

I met another dad at the back of the room, his boy played with ours and yes, he had noticed them ‘mis-behaving’ a bit. I remembered seeing the boys mucking around on the mat during story time, not annoying but not listening either.

Later I managed to ask my son about it and he quickly replied ‘Oh you mean that story, about the big mother bunny. We’ve heard that one before.’

I mentioned this to the other dad and we agreed that while there was a huge art area and costumes for Africa their selection of wooden blocks and Lego was a bit dated.

I was about to ask one of the teachers, when she told me how this year’s fundraising money was for new rugby, basketball and soccer balls, fancy new Lego and big books with dinosaurs or tractors.

It worked! Though the boys eventually broke out to a playground across the road, they loved that kindergarten.

Our first year primary teacher was amazing with boys. She used motorcycle design legend John Britten as a role model and accepted live wetas as news. It was a shame, though, that the only regular male seen during school hours was the grumpy caretaker.

Men have effectively evacuated the learning professions. This “feminisation” of schools is said to have begun after WW2.

It is claimed that returning servicemen were given preferential treatment, some oblivious to their own dis-abilities, resulting in many frustrated female teachers eventually asserting their abilities on merit, the net effect being a steady push of men out of education.

As women began to dominate the classrooms, many traditional, competitive teaching methods, including some competitive sport were banned.

Boys who were noisy or dominant were seen as taking the teacher’s attention away from the more readily attentive girls. Earlier initiatives to ensure girls were not marginalised in schools had been successful, but they also uncovered gender differences in learning which in our country seem to have been forgotten.

An international study from Scotland found that girls are not generally brighter than boys, they tend to fill the middle ground.

The ‘average’ girl works harder and achieves better grades than the ‘average’ boy, but it is boys who more often top classes, yet simultaneously fill most of the low performer ranks.

In some countries, gender specific learning methods are highly rated, but here in New Zealand we have been leaning on the teachers.

In one of his last acts as education minister, Nick Smith commissioned an ERO report into gender differences in learning. He also announced including men as target groups for ‘teachnz’ scholarships, a plan that was quickly abandoned.

Time magazine recently reviewed boys vs. girls performance throughout the USA, including everything from preschool achievements to university degrees and lifestyle outcomes like teenage pregnancies, drug and imprisonment rates.

Early teaching apparently recorded little differences, but during the 70’s and 80’s, boys’ outcomes had changed. The number of male students needing reading assistance, falling in grades and having behavioural issues was increasing, but teachers were also celebrating improved outcomes for girls.

As Time magazine noted, early intervention policies with community backing identified at-risk students, investigated their family situations and provided support according to needs. Many boys stepped up with that extra attention and rapid improvements followed.

As a result the gap has been reduced in the USA but girls still outperform boys.

Learning styles may have a lot to do with it. One study, comparing teaching methods in different countries, found that Japanese students, who regularly rated highly in international comparisons, were being taught in entirely different ways, using a discovery method.

Students are presented with problems they can’t solve given all the tools they have learned so far. They start thinking about what they need to solve it, and some of this happens in working groups, some of it in the whole class.

As the groups progress, the teacher provides the extra tools and the information the students need, bit by bit. The students get the thrill of learning.

This is almost the direct opposite of the style used in our schools, where the tools or a story are given first and practised through exercises. At early primary level, a large part of teaching consists of listening and copying, and provides very little challenge .

The Japanese method appeals to a sense of exploration and adventure. The thrill of solving a problem offers the kind of short-term reward that keeps children interested in learning.

For boys , who are often seen bored at school and engage in unnecessary risk taking, such an approach would focus those energies in a more positive way.

Society needs those problem-solvers. If we are faced with a burning building, somebody has to solve the problems of finding and rescuing people without a handbook.

The police, many computer jobs, construction and management – all have a strong element of problem-solving, needing fast analysis of the problem and action. All these professions are dominated by men.

Since the last ERO report on Boys vs. Girls there have been several conferences, research papers and reviews. One of these said that the current monotone approach to schooling should be expanded to enable more new and innovative methods.

This means giving principals more discretion to make decisions about what is taught in their schools, how schools spend the funds they receive and what works for the needs of particular pupils.

Diverse approaches to schooling are a vital part of bridging the gap between the achievement standards of all students.

As long as our educational bureaucratic framework seems inflexible it will remain up to local teachers and determined dads to ensure that neither rigid teaching methods nor old stereotypes deter their boys or girls from achieving their full potential in NZ schools.

The Brain Angle

Learning and gender expert Michael Gurian (Author of 2007 book “The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life”) has taken modern brain-scan based approaches to identify why and how boy-girl differences affect learning styles.

He found that at high school level writing, girls on average:

• Use more words than boys
• Include more complex sensory details like color and texture, and
• Add more emotive and feeling details (“Judy said she liked him” “Timmy frowned”).

Gurian thinks this is due to higher blood flow in the verbal centers of the girls’ brains, more neural connections between the verbal and emotive centers and more blood flow in sensorial centres

A visual link to learning helps girls connect colour variety and other sensoral detail like facial expressions,. Boys recognise spatial activity and graphic clues more quickly.

In a boy’s brain, less of the “calming chemical,” serotonin, is present and they also have the ability to zone-out or doze during a lesson. This makes them seem both distracting and disrespectful.

When his specific teaching methods for both boys and girls were trialled at six Missouri schools, outcomes for both sexes improved markedly and discipline issues dropped by as much as 35%.

Linking words to maths has proven to be an amazing help, closing previous girl performance gaps in mathematics and sciences.

The current emphasis on cooperative learning has proven to prepare children well for consensus building and communications, but the elimination of competitive elements from the class has also robbed many boys and girls of the chance to shine and lead.

Next: Motherless Girls

Focus on Men In Early Childhood Education

A report released on Mon 25 September by Early Childhood Education Researcher Sarah Farquhar has revealed that less than 1% of Early Childhood Educators in New Zealand are men.

In her report she calls for open debate on men in early childhood education to remove what she reports as inherent sexism and fears of paedophile accusations, in the field.

A day later, the Early Childhood Council Chief Executive Sue Thorne called for a Government-led initiative to encourage more men into the profession.

She commented in a Christchurch Press article (Sept 26) that many men felt unwelcome in childcare and that the paedophile ‘hysteria’ of the 1990’s had resulted in existing male educators leaving the profession and potential male trainees avoiding the profession.

Other researchers in the field however, have identified other barriers and suggest that the perceived public and media hysteria regarding sex abuse and paedopilia are actually masking the effect of issues such as low pay, low social status of the work and perception of EC education as a ‘women’s career’ as barriers to men entering the profession.