Have a similar (n=1, usual caveats apply) experience with one of my partner's nephews. Incredible kid, very creative, very excited about all kinds of things. Then he gets enrolled in primary school, within 3 months all the joy is sucked out of this kid, loathes going to school, doing homework is a daily struggle.
His parents moved him to a Waldorf/Rudolf Steiner school for the next year, and within a few months the old personality is back, excited to go to school, etc. Two years in, he's among the best in his class according to his teachers, has become class president, etc.
Now, I'm not a huge fan of the whole Waldorf/Steiner anthroposophy shtick, but the results in this individual case have me convinced that their approach has some merit.
> Then he gets enrolled in primary school, within 3 months all the joy is sucked out of this kid, loathes going to school, doing homework is a daily struggle
Kids have homework in their first year of primary school???
Yes, same here in Austria (if that isn't were OP is based). I would imagine it's the same in Germany, since the school system is quite similar. Of course it's possible that some schools handle it differently, but this is the "standard" way as far as I am aware.
AFAIK none of the primary schools here in the Netherlands give kids any homework until the last 2 or 3 years of primary school, when the kids are 9 or 10 at least.
Don't forget that primary school starts later in Germany than in the Netherlands where children go to primary school from the day of their fourth birthday. In contrast, German primary school starts around the age of 6 (not exactly because all children regardless of birth date start in summer).
That means that the two to three years of primary school without homework mostly equate with the last two years of kindergarten in Germany (which obviously also do not assign any homework)
Primary school in the Netherlands lasts 8 years, typically from age 4 to 12. The first 2 years used to be to be separate and non-mandatory until the 1980s, when they were merged into a single 8 year track. Homework typically doesn't start until the 5th or 6th year, so when the kids are age 9 or 10. They certainly don't get any homework before they're 8 years old.
Around here the public schools give homework starting in 1st grade. Very little, but it increases pretty fast after that.
Not new, really. I was assigned lots of homework in grade school, back in the early 90s. I just easily got all of it done at school (still with tons of time to spare for reading, writing, and drawing), so it never actually went home.
Why have homework at all for anyone? Can’t the school do its job of educating within the four walls? If the school day isn’t long enough by all means let’s make it longer.
The problem in education is that it's very hard to separate what works and what doesn't because there are too many subjective factors.
If Tommy diligently practices math every day and does all his homework, but gets worse test scores than lazy Billy, it's impossible to know whether he is studying in a counterproductive manner, has poor test-taking technique, or is just less able than Billy. If the inverse is true, intuition and a desperate desire for justice tell us that Tommy's hard work is what made his performance better (and possibly, that he works harder because he's more intelligent).
OR we can just say that it probably doesn't make a difference and that it's ok to give back to the kids the few free hours they get at home everyday by not making them do the same thing they did all the day.
It’s a failure on the part of the education system to specify what they need to succeed. If schools are going to outsource their work back to parents and guardians maybe they should pay them.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Parents aren't expected to do homework. Furthermore, I consider it to be fundamentally the responsibility of parents and guardians to educate their children. The outsourcing goes in the opposite direction. If that education is insufficient, the ultimate responsibility lies with the parents, not the school. Maybe the parent can engage with the school to improve the situation, but that's not always a given.
Some goof off all day at school instead of doing any work- should they be able to then not take the work home and do it there and still get the same grade as the students who don't goof off and get their work done in class?
Should all students be required to spend the same amount of time at school doing school work when some would prefer to do their work at home?
At what grade level is it appropriate to allow students to manage their own schedules and where they do their school work? Elementary? Junior high? High school? College?
My kids go to a Waldorf school. Around half of the kids in my oldest son's class came in later grades, with a story like this.
While there are some odd things in anthroposophy, I think a great deal of it is actually metaphorical and coming from someone with a good intuition about how humans work. You have to look past the terminology, though, and the 1910-20ish free speculation about how the world works. :)
There's an emphasis on self-development, too, which I've come to see as a vital part of working with humans. If you can't look past your own self and own biases, you'll never be able to work with all sorts of people on their terms.
I think the success is partly accidental - when these schools started, traditional schools were often militaristic in style and with a focus on obedience and listening in silence.
Montessori schools emphasised interaction and discovery using the simple tools of the day, like tools and toys.
In todays school, the kids are often overstimulated by our current multi-media world. Montessori schools provide a calmer environment.
So my pet theory is that they started out as stimulating under-stimulated kids, and today are calming down over-stimulated kids.
Public Schooling is explicitly about conditioning obedience. It’s more like that today than when it was first created.
What Montessori and Waldorf both intuited is that children have a natural state which is optimum for learning. I too disagree with many aspects of how they get there, but the orientation matters.
I even saw this growing up homeschooling, where arguably no institution is involved.
Homeschooled kids who hated learning and mostly felt no one cared what they thought were taught with textbooks.
Kids who were homeschooled with unschooling, Montessori, unit studies, or basically any other form of student-directed learning seems “in themselves.” They we’re curious, relaxed, interested in the world, helpful.
Their parents could be weird, they could be raised in a cult, still it held up.
There really is a fundamental gap in “what a human being is for” between authoritarian and self-determinate approaches.
Authoritarians truly have no idea what they are trading for in order to enforce the “values” they pretend to have. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work to introduce human-first approaches to education institutions. Authoritarians recognize this approach as one they can’t relate to and they are afraid of it. Even when teachers, parents, and students are willing, authoritarian admins will completely shut it down.
There’s one reliable way to distinguish these systems - tune into your kid as a parent and believe what you are feeling.
It can hard to do in the face of societal expectations & realities, it’s even hard for me sometimes and I have a lifetime of choosing my own path.
“Most Likely to Succeed” is an incredible body of research from Harvard on this and the documentary that goes with it hits even harder.
Parents/guardians who care about their kids deserve to trust their intuition about what they need.
I went to a Waldorf school that was incredible for me. The same school today is a disturbing little cult with a few roads on campus named for my former teachers and administrators. I love the potential of Waldorf (and Montessori, too!) but some of those parent communities are a toxic mess.
