Waldorf Education: The Art Of Learning

By Jeff White

On bright, sunny days, classrooms at the Housatonic Valley Waldorf School in Dodgingtown are lit only by natural light streaming in through windows. Students sing the roll call, recite equally brilliant streams of verse, and pipe harmonic notes on mahogany recorders, the sounds spilling out into the parking lot.

Often, your first impression upon visiting a Waldorf school centers on these early morning rituals.

The Housatonic Valley Waldorf School took up residence in Newtown over a month ago in the buildings formally owned by the Newtown Montessori Society. Although some Waldorf Schools date back 70 years, the Housatonic Valley School had its genesis in New Milford 11 years ago, with a group of parents meeting biweekly to discuss the feasibility of starting a Waldorf nursery and kindergarten. One year later, in 1990, such a school opened with 10 students and two teachers. Since those early years, the school has also called Bridgewater, Brookfield, and now Newtown, home.

Today, 57 children are enrolled in the red and white Waldorf buildings in Dodgingtown, from nursery school-aged students to sixth graders.

 “[A Waldorf School] teaches through doing,” explains Debbie McQuaite, the soft-spoken head administrator currently overseeing the school at its new site, after helping with its move from Brookfield, which it had called home for the last three years.

Melissa Merkling, who is busying training to takeover administrative duties from Mrs McQuaite, describes a Waldorf education as a process of creating well-rounded people. “Waldorf education is not about specialization, it’s about diversity. It’s not [supposed] to produce a cog for the machinery of society. It’s to tap a child’s innate ability.”

“It engages an entire child — body, mind and soul,” Mrs McQuaite adds.

The quaint classrooms in the former Montessori buildings seem to compliment Waldorf classes well. Gray carpeted classrooms are suited for the variety of seated “circle” activities in which students participate, where students seem to spend equal amounts of time seated on the floor and stretching to the ceiling with gestures spawned by musical routines.

Yet, the shadowy classrooms, the walls peppered with student artwork, the hand-sewn bags that cradle the popular recorders, the students clad in slippers, all only give a partial view into Waldorf’s educational philosophy, yet all play integral roles.

Traditional Academics in a Waldorf School

That Housatonic Valley Waldorf teachers prefer ambient light to the droning hum of neon bulbs is not all that surprising in a school with a philosophy rooted in natural, classical education.

Waldorf’s roots date back to the early part of the 20th century, when Austrian Rudolf Steiner started the first Waldorf school as a means of training the children of German factory workers during the first World War. The result: a learning landscape that eschewed traditional educational practices for a more ethical, feeling-oriented school.

Today, close to 130 Waldorf schools exist in the United States, a number that is growing fast enough for The Atlantic Monthly to refer to them as “quite possibly the world’s fastest-growing independent school system” in a September, 1999 article.

Waldorf teachers see each child as essentially possessing three elemental parts—body, mind and soul. Thus, a curriculum seemingly devoid of traditional textbooks and binders still aims to engage students on a daily basis with exercises that oftentimes work these different parts simultaneously. It is not enough for Waldorf students to learn math skills, or master the art of writing well; each day’s lessons are structured to stimulate every sense possessed by students.

Students at the Housatonic Valley School receive many of the same academic subjects as students in mainstream school systems. Basic courses like math, reading, foreign language and writing are taught, just not in the traditional sense of a public school — they are taught in blocks.

Lower grade levels deal with primary academic subjects twice a year in intense six-week periods. In the fall, students work on a math block. For two hours each day, during the morning’s main lesson, they work through a variety of skills in the math curriculum according to their grade level. After that six-week period is over, students will take on another academic block, such as science or natural history. In the springtime, students revisit math during another six-week block, and the cycle continues.

Although this block format is mirrored in the higher grades, Mrs McQuaite says that older students to a small degree work with the major academic subjects every day, in addition to whatever main academic block they are studying.

The pressures of grades and academic assessment do not control students at the Housatonic Valley School, or any Waldorf student for that matter. No grades are given during a student’s first six years. Although this might seem like a “soft” way of teaching educational essentials—math and science only twice a year, no report cards—Mrs McQuaite is quick to point out the advantages of the block system. “You have a two-hour main lesson [each day], so you can spend an entire period on the subject without getting interrupted.”

Still, even during these intensive instructional periods, lesson plans at the Housatonic Valley School rarely resemble teacher lectures. Instead, students are busy working in groups on projects related to a particular unit, while the teacher wanders between groups, observing and critiquing. Fifth and sixth grade students in Ann Shearin’s combined class toil over their hand drawn maps of South America, a geographical exercise in a unit dealing with the ancient Incas of Machu Picchu.

Whereas older students immerse themselves in academic subjects, younger students, like the ones in Anna Lee Riley’s second grade class, focus more on singing and poetic recitations. Fables are sung and acted out, songs that the class has been working on are perfected, and as more academic subjects begin to creep into the day (students as early as first grade learn Spanish and German), they are still taught with song and repetition.

In fact, song, and to a larger extent, art, is the glue that keeps the Housatonic Valley School’s curriculum together.

Art and Music As Anchors

Though a primacy in Waldorf education is placed on students learning at their own pace, a unifying aspect throughout the curriculum is the constant presence of art and music.

If academic subjects such as math and science stimulate the mind, a student’s body and soul are well tended to by an array of hands-on activities and musical exercises, all of which act to anchor the learning process.

From the earliest age, students are given a wooden recorder that they learn to play. In Anna Lee Riley’s second grade class, many of the early morning songs have an accompaniment of recorders, as student alternate between singing a cappella and piping. As students mature in the school, they take on an orchestral instrument instead of a recorder.

Foundations in reading and language skills are taught almost entirely through singing and poetic recitation. Students master verbal skills by reciting poems and acting out complex singing rounds. There are no music or lyric sheets in front of students during these early morning exercises; the choruses come from their memories. “It’s all there,” says Mrs McQuaite. “It’s just a matter of tapping.”

A Waldorf student can expect to master other skills as well, such as knitting, crocheting, sewing and a therapeutic dance called Curative Eurythmy, a combination of stretching and coordination movements done on one-on-one basis with an instructor.

“The arts are so undervalued,” Mrs McQuaite says, commenting on traditional schools. “In a Waldorf education, they are woven right into the curriculum.” If a class is learning about a particular historical time, for example, they may choose to act out a play based on historical events, playing the music for the production, making their own costumes and building their own sets.

To a world governed by technology and “instant access,” Waldorf education turns its back. Computers are not even implemented into Waldorf curriculum until high school, and even then an emphasis is placed on hands-on learning. Students learn to build their own computers before learning how to use a word processor.

But is it dangerous to place so great an emphasis on painting, music playing and clay molding in such a technologically driven world? Mrs McQuaite says without hesitation, no.

“You still have to crawl before you learn to walk,” she says. “[Students] are used to being engaged in their entire being. Art and music is almost like having another language, a musical or artistic language. It’s another way to look at the world, another approach to creative problem solving.”

Mrs McQuaite knows that she is not training students to become world class artists or musicians. Some in fact will. But most will develop other skills that they excel in more, and the artistic training at their Waldorf school will just blend into their personal landscape, making them well rounded.

Housatonic Valley Looking Toward the Future

Waldorf students have adjusted well to their new Dodgingtown home, so well in fact that the larger facility of the new Housatonic Valley School promises to draw more students from neighboring towns like Bethel, Danbury, Trumbull and Fairfield.

The enrollment of 57 students is expected to rise next fall by at least 30 students, according to Mrs McQuaite. Because teachers follow their students through the grade levels (typical of a Waldorf school), the Housatonic Valley School adds one class each year. Next year, the current sixth grade class will form the school’s seventh grade. The following year, another new first grade class will be formed, and the seventh grade will become the eighth grade.

But that will be the end of the road for many Waldorf students at the Housatonic Valley School, since the area lacks a Waldorf high school akin to the ones that dot California. Many Housatonic Valley School students, when they reach the eighth grade in a few years, will most likely enter the public school system, either in Newtown or their native towns.

And this could prove the ultimate test for Waldorf education, when students enter a school system vastly different from the environment in which they were brought up.

Mrs McQuaite has a daughter currently at Newtown High School. She went through Waldorf schools before entering Newtown’s public schools, and has adjusted well, though Mrs McQuaite confides that her daughter sometimes gets impatient with the instruction she receives.

In fact, many experts maintain that the way a Waldorf education bolsters every aspect of a student’s development creates young men and women who possess an uncanny ability to concentrate, using efficient and oftentimes ingenious ways of solving problems, and a keen sense of their own limitations and strengths.

Skills needed for success in any school system.