Mencken, Mencken, Mencken

A former student, who irreverently refers to me as "Big Ass"--I'm large, and this nickname evolved from "Big S," for me and the first initial of my last name--just sent me this quotation:

"The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how
can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Mencken's right, but he doesn't go far enough. It's not just schoolmasters who are essentially an ass; just ask Dogberry ("Much Ado About Nothing"): "But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass..." Sheriffs, too, and all the rest of us--what do we think of bankers at the moment? --are an ass.

To call teaching "puerile" is simply to name an occupation by its inescapable preoccupation.

But to call teaching an "avocation" demonstrates the difference between Mencken's time and ours, or Mencken's mind and mine. I am not an ass avocationally. I am called to be an ass.

Beware "First Grade Readiness"

This post may strike some readers as a minor, picayune point, but to others it may go to the core of their trouble with Waldorf school ideologues.

Many Waldorf schools leave it to kindergarten teachers to determine which children are "ready" for first grade. Parents are told, following assessment, whether or not, in the eyes of these teachers, their child is ready for first grade.

Often, assessments don't take place until late spring, leaving parents anxious and wondering--if my child isn't "ready," will I still have time to get him into another local private school's first grade? Parents may use this waffling to look around. And get excited--or see their children get excited--about the green grass on the other side of the fence.

You see, for parents, the issue is often NOT whether or not the child is "first-grade ready," but whether or not the Waldorf school will promote him. A child judged not to be first-grade ready, in my experience, is more likely to leave the school for first grade somewhere else--another Waldorf school, the local public school. It's relatively rare that parents are so committed to the school or to Waldorf education at all costs that they'll bow to the teachers' judgment in this case.

I'm not saying the teachers are wrong, I'm just saying that the language and process they use can unnecessarily alienate parents. A goal for a school could be to have any family that leaves--after being denied admission or after being counselled out for any reason--to wish fervently that they could have obtained the pearl they sought. Somehow, Harvard manages to do this and Waldorf schools don't.

And isn't such a process like leaving high school admissions to the 8th grade teacher? Or college admissions to high school teachers? Yes, teachers should take into account the recommendations of previous teachers--8th grade, kindergarten--but determination should rest with the school or class or grade the child is entering, in almost every case. "First-grade readiness" should more accurately, less politically, less ideologically, more politely, be called "elementary school admissions."

Most children are simply ready for first grade, anyway, based on "normal" development and birthday. Yet, often, a whole class of parents is held hostage to assessments made late in the kindergarten year. Wouldn't it make more sense to alert the few parents of children for whom there's an issue--a true developmental delay, a real concern over birthdate--and let the others breathe easy? Shouldn't these parents know long before the spring of kindergarten rolls around that there may be some developmental or educational issue that they and their teachers may wish to address?

When children are assessed in the spring of their kindergarten year for admission to elementary school the following fall--half a year away--they still have almost ten per cent of a life to lead! Lots can change...

Another point: Often, children apply directly to first grade, having attended another (non-Waldorf) early childhood program. Are these children shipped to the kindergarten to be assessed? No! They're interviewed by the first grade teacher or her proxy! Why the special treatment? (Really, why the normal treatment?)

I understand that I'm writing about unusual circumstances. But, as a former school administrator, I know that it only takes one angry parent every other year or so to make a school's life really difficult. And don't forget that the early childhood program is the base on which the whole school is built. Small kindergarten? Don't expect a large first grade. Shrinking kindergarten? Your operating budget for the foreseeable future is in jeopardy.

Also, the solution--changing the way we talk about things and not using the phrase "first-grade ready;" talking directly to parents as partners in education; and acknowledging that, after all advice and recommendations, it's up to the elementary school to select the students it can teach--is so easy.

High School Matters: Turning Convention On Its Head

Conventional wisdom around Waldorf education is this: Early childhood "matters" the most--if all you can afford, let's say, is an EC program, that's great. Elementary education "matters" next most; if you can afford to get your children through eight elementary grades at a Waldorf school, you've given them an immense blessing. And, especially given the small number of Waldorf high schools, it's okay for those who can afford it or who are so zealous about the education that they'll make it work for another four year, but it's somehow not essential to the humanizing, imaginative, creative promise of Steiner's educational ideas.

But, when I think of those I know who are active in Waldorf education as teachers, parents, or trustees, and who themselves attended a Waldorf school, I reach a surprising conclusion: High school matters most. At the two Waldorf schools closest to me, of those involved who attended a Waldorf school, almost all attended at least one year of high school. They may have attended elementary school, too. But those who attended only through eighth grade are virtually absent and uncounted. When I think of those I correspond with at other schools who attended Waldorf schools, they, too, overwhelmingly, were present for high school.

I had lunch with a former (Waldorf high school) student of mine today who had this to say: If he had been given the choice in 8th grade, he would have chosen public school for social reasons, primarily. Looking back--he graduated three years ago--he not only recognizes the value of his high school education, but is interested in discussing how such an education can be made available to more and more students. He went through 14 years of Waldorf education, by the way, and recognizes that it was only in high school and afterward that he became conscious of its work on him. He went so far as to say that he believed it was "lost" on many of those who left after eighth grade.

I don't mean at all to demean Waldorf elementary school or those who leave after eight years of it. Far from it; my wife and I sacrificed a lot to make sure our children received this benefit. But there is no way, in my experience, in that of my children, in that of my former student, and in that of many friends, that the full benefits of a Waldorf education are reached after elementary school alone.

Class Size

What’s the ideal class size? Parents in independent schools turn purple and yell if there are too many students in a class—more than 12, 15, or 24. Public schools are under constant pressure to reduce class sizes, and we’re supposed to be outraged that poor-performing districts pack more than 30 children into one classroom.

But parents will do almost anything—and pay twice as much, sometimes—to get their children, the very next year, into universities in which introductory class sizes run in the hundreds!

One of the best graduate students I have had, an articulate and well-educated young woman from India, during a discussion of class size, announced calmly, “Well, my smallest elementary school class was 65 students.”

Research may show that there is some ideal class size (maybe it’s a class of one… Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great). But any ideal class size likely depends on how education is conducted. If we assume that education must consist of 45 minute periods followed by a bell and a change to some unrelated activity (regardless of where we were in the previous class), taught from a textbook in which every fact sits next to every other fact, meaning drained by sameness, taught by a teacher specialist who doesn’t really talk to other teachers, who sees students a few periods a week for a year and then no more, who doesn’t know her students from the local community because she can’t afford to live there and commutes from another town, then we may well scream when class sizes get “too big” and performance fades. If education is an agribusiness, then the efficiencies of agribusiness will apply.

If education is more successfully like organic farming, however, then different values and different efficiencies will apply, and what we think we know of class size may have to be tossed.

Current research points more to SCHOOL size as a factor in educational success—the best schools are those in which each teacher can know each student’s name (and vice versa). And there’s a rush to carve up large schools—following a misguided century of centralization—into smaller “learning communities” of between 200 and 300 students. But the same arguments about agribusiness and organic farming apply here, too—it’s in the system we’ve got that schools perform best at this particular size.

We need to examine the fruits of our system—do we really want a bland, easily shipped but juiceless harvest, disaffected and genetically modified? Thankfully, the harvest is our kids, who grow up to thank us—or rebuke us—for the way they were raised. Everything we need to know is right in front of us.