Waldorf schools teach reading—for example—more thoroughly and in a greater context of meaning than does any other method of which I know. From pictures through letter-forms to writing to reading, from stories told to stories written to stories read (leaving aside the chicken-and-egg insight that reading and writing imply each other and necessarily accompany each other). This, so far as we know, is the way reading and writing evolved in the history of human beings on earth. Such a careful, thoughtful approach to learning to read endows children with reverence for language and initiates them into a world of interpretation. And research shows that by fourth grade there is no way to distinguish those who learned to read at three from those who learned to read at seven.
While three-year-old readers race ahead, they may miss the soup and bread making, story time, singing, playing, painting and working that might have sustained the fruitful and dreamy wonder of their childhoods. These same benefits belong to those children spared the onslaught of mass media, the systemic assaults of overly processed food, or the promotion of self that accompanies striving to win.
So why are Waldorf schools such crypto-ascetics, why do they—parents and teacher—say “don’t” so often? “We don’t teach reading in kindergarten.”
They are teaching reading in kindergarten. In the scope of history and a Waldorf school curriculum, kindergarteners are doing exactly what they should be doing in order to read well and thoroughly for the rest of their lives, eventually to see reading not merely as “decoding” a text but as approaching symbolic insight in all that life has to offer.
Isn’t a Waldorf school a place where they don’t teach reading, don’t believe in competition, don’t watch TV or use computers, don’t eat normal food? No. A Waldorf school is a place that believes in place and time and health and childhood and meaning.
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