Waldorf Schools and Discipline

Waldorf teacher Steve Sagarin has written a blog about Waldorf discipline methods here: http://ssagarin.blogspot.se/2012/06/glance-at-discipline-methods-in-waldorf.html

There are some great comments there.  Here's one of the posts describing a parent's Waldorf school experience.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for raising the discipline question in Waldorf schools Steve. When our family joined a Waldorf school, I was confident that the teachers would use warm, loving discipline to carry the children and move the classroom dynamics. I witnessed this in the kindergarten and when my children went into the grade school, quite frankly, I was shocked at the lack of skills the teachers had and at the great lengths the teachers went to from owning their own dysfunctional behavior. Waldorf schools can be one of the unhealthiest and most dysfunctional social environments I have ever experienced. Teachers target children, make disparaging comments about them to other parents and in the hallways and fail to look within when classroom behavior gets out of hand. In my community over the years we have had several crisis classes and the school failed to rally and bring healthy communication and process to the classes and the classroom dynamics. Entire classes have been labeled troubled yet no intervention, no healing, no help was brought in. When that was suggested/requested by parents in a few classes in crisis that our children were in, the school stonewalled the parents and gave us the usual "waldorfese" or "That's not how WE do things" I was very disappointed and realized that the social life of the community, the health of the children and the quality of education are really nothing like what is promised in all the lovely videos. Parents removed their children from our school after watching the videos of the Waldorf promise because our school is so far from delivering that image in real life when you get beyond the lazured walls and the pretty pictures and the "Waldorfese" of the staff. Ironically our school has a Kim Payne conflict "expert"

July 14, 2012 11:43 AM