Coming into 2025 I'm inclined to reflect on the past years homeschooling as I come to an end of the home ed journey, most likely, with my third child. There have been so many changes over the years and so many things staying the same, in some ways. When I became a parent this was the last thing on my mind, and I really thought that there would be some good alternative schools to meet my kids needs. I feel this has only gotten worse in the last, approx 12years with the implementation of the national curriculum. There are more teachers under strain, more students being failed, too many unnecessary labels because people no longer seem to understand basic childhood or human development and that these things happen over a curve, and then of course there are the people who actually require the labels, and the extra assistance but are likely lost in the noise of the misundertanding of childhood and a natural education.
As a long term Steiner inspired home educator, I have really liked Steiner's philosophy on giving children time to play and grow via imagination. I find the Steiner school attitude too dogmatic generally, and interestingly that in reading Steiner himself, he said that his way of doing would eventually become a dogma as we get further and further from his time. Some of my main takeaways from reading and learning various aspects of Steiner are: stages of development- birth to 7 is all about imitation, kids copy everything and that is how they learn. If you don't like how they are doing something, try to work out where it is coming from. 7-14 is about imagination, engaging in storying telling, play, creativity. 14-21 is about inspiration and this is the time when kids recognise their own inner shadows, and it is worth finding inspiring people and characters and mentors to guide them through darkness and into light. 21-28 is about ego and working out who one is as an individual.
Another aspect that I really appreciate in a Steiner inspired education is engaging head, heart and hands. The head being the thinking intellectual side, the heart being the feeling, spiritual, emotional side, and the hands being the action oriented side. A well rounded education should offer all of these things, and this is where a modern schooled education currently fails- the curriculum is stuffed too full and gives the impression that it caters to the arts and to movement, but allows the teacher very little flexibility to cater to her students as individuals within their group.
When we moved back to Australia and began permanently home educating in 2007, there were whispers of a national curriculum. I was not impressed, living in the UK, we had chosen a Steiner school for DD24 because the papers were reporting all over the place that the national curriculum was failing our children. When we settled into home ed, in Adelaide, and I had to understand the learning outcome style of reporting on education, it was challenging. I had to take the idea of what was required in the outcomes and work out how what we were doing was meeting those outcomes. As a basic idea of what this was like to navigate, an outcome could be that children learn to balance. From there it was up to the teacher to work out how their class would learn that skill- it could be skating, cycling, gym,etc. As a newbie home education parent this was a challenge, and it must also have been a challenge for a newbie teacher. The national curriculum told teachers what to do and when to do it, and sadly it removed the teachers ability to cater on a more individual level to their class, to garner how to meet the individual's within the class' needs.
As this has gone on the pigeonholing of students has become ever more ridiculous. Are there any normal children left? I find I hardly meet a person these days who has a child that is just a child. I am intrigued by how disconnected we have become to children. In the last few years I've come to understand children's brainwaves better, and the idea that Steiner put forth that children are in a dream like state. Until seeing some of the recent research on this, I did not understand just how true this is. Up til approximately 7 children are in a sleeping awake state. The older and older they get, the more they grow out of this, their brainwaves change until they are in an adult waking state. The under 7 stage is perfect for programming their minds and creating life long healthful habits if we treat our children well, but at least in Australia, we are not doing that. We are asking them to be still, when they need to move and to learn proprioception, we are complaining that they are reading too late- when reading is actively connected to this awakening process, we are forgetting the power that is in our children's readiness and trying to speed them up to suit school, instead of realising that school should be addressing our children's uniqueness and trying to identify their readiness. It is interesting to me that instead of copying many of the Scandanavian countries styles of education, which dissuade from academic education before 7 we decided to copy a system that was reported on as failing. One can only ask, why?
Some links on brainwaves and children (not my original reading, just a few from a brief search for this blog post)-
https://www.psypost.org/new-study-finds-theta-brainwave-activity-in-childhood-predicts-iq-at-age-18/
https://www.amandaleebrady.com/understanding-the-brainwaves-of-your-children/
https://boldscience.org/measuring-brainwaves-to-understand-how-children-learn/
https://silvamethodgb.com/why-children-learn-so-fast/
