The other thing I meant to add about our local one is that a friend whose children go there has found it difficult to afford the supplies they insist the children have - it has to be a certain brand of crayon, for example, and they are not cheap, and they have to have them in felt rolls, again, brand specified. I find that level of inflexibility a bit scary, and I’m another one who’s seen identical artwork and so on from kindergarten children. Mind you, I have another friend whose daughter has just started kindergarten there - I’ll ask her how it’s going.

Thank you so much everyone, the thing is before we discovered that the art was not actually art but copying i was all ready to drive 40 mins to school and 40 mins back again. My dd is so into drawing and creating beautiful pictures it would actually be cruel to stop her from drawing her birds and houses and fairys. I agree that lots of kids do the same in regular schools and that is the first thing i look at when i go into the class if all the trees are green with brown trunks with the same shaped leaves cut out by a teacher rather than the child etc. I just can’t imagine my dd doing swishy pictures, she is always so clear and precise about what she is doing when putting pen to paper imo it would just be wrong to tell her she can’t use a certain colour until she is older.
Like many people have said there are good and bad in all schools and as much as i love, love, love the classrooms, baking, nature in steiner, i just can’t get my head around the history, the reading list for teachers or the art thing.
So we’ll try the little school which said ‘‘yes please to parent participation’’ (they may well regret that) but the teacher was lovely, well in control, the class size was reasonably small at 20 which gets split up often as they have two ages 4 and 5 and i’m hoping it will be a family atmosphere. I would really hate to change schools once we’ve got going. I suppose you can never tell if it’s the right school for your child until you dive in.
Thank you all for your honest and non trolly comments, it’s so nice to have somewhere where you can trust people to remind you that common sense is always the best approach

has anyone ever read the esther freud book, the wild?  it’s written from the perspective of a ten yr old girl attending a steiner school, (did esther freud go to one I wonder?) one of the comments she makes is that during any art lessons they are told to do a specific thing with a specific colour and if it’s not quite ‘right’ the teacher comes along and ‘corrects’ it himself, sweeping over it, until everyone’ had a uniform perfect identical look.  can well believe it, i had a friend who wanted to be a steiner teaher and she was training at Emerson, she left, specifically because she found lack of individual expression utterly quelled.  They allow the use of only one colour for many many months (yellow) in the youngest class, then later a dab of red could be introduced in a specific place on the paper, months later, a bit of blue, again in a certain way.  The whole reasoning behind this is anthroposophy based and sort of weird.  Black is not allowed at all and neither are right angles, corners et etc as these are too harsh fir the child who has not incarnated into this life properly etc etc (hey I love play silks, I do, but I don’t need to drape evry single corner of the room with one for children under 7).  Steiner was an absoloute weirdo I reckon, and his teachings may have been useful if viewed generally, but his ‘followers’, even now, have sort of given him Jesus status and have made his teachings/thought/philosophy into absolute literal things.  One would be wise to find out as much as pos. about anthroposophy since this lies behind every teacher meeting, ever teacher child interaction (from the teacher pov), every lesson plan, every aspect of school life.  Although rarely, if ever mentioned in the literature.  I reckon most parents would run otherwise.

These things have been on my mind a lot as I’ve been doing a short introductory course on steiner parenting/kindergarten. I’m part of a parent-led steiner-inspired playgroup (snappy name eh?) and we wanted to get some more of that inspiration as our current lot of parents don’t really know anything about the steiner approach (we just follow a formula that’s been in place for some time).

The really nice thing about our situation is we can have the wooden toys, we can make the bread, we can play outside and celebrate seasonal festivals, but we are not beholden to the doctrine. We take what we want and ignore the rest. TBH I’ve found that philosophy is also shared by many Steiner practitioners - that they see benefits in the Steiner system vs the mainstream and so they take that on, but don’t overly concern themselves with the Anthroposophy, the angels and so on. Like someone else mentioned before it seems to me that the newer schools are probably more flexible. With the advent of Free Schools I suspect we’ll see a lot more Steiner-inspired schools pop up, there are plenty in the States, and I believe there are a lot of people here who would like to do things differently but see the Steiner approach as “stuck”.

I think there is truth in that some people revere Steiner - I like to put him in his historical context: he was writing and theorising not long after we had just experienced a major paradigm shift - Darwin had basically swept away all that most people had held to be true about the world. God was going awol. There were a lot of people therefore searching for a new “grand unifying theory of everything”, and I see him as one of them.

I’m really interested to read the Esther Freud book now, as Hideous Kinky was very interesting.

I wasn’t going to say it before (wasn’t sure how much could be said without a thread being closed) but one of my main issues was with the teachers.  It was clear who was a Steiner-follower and who was just a teacher in the school who perhaps liked some of the Steiner styles.  The way they spoke, the way they looked (glazed over eyes, i kid you not!) these strange stares and when I asked a few questions that they didn’t like there were very obvious “freemason” type handsignals and glances between them.  I really would have felt very uncomfortable leaving my child in their presence.  on the otherhand there were a few ex mainstream teachers who enjoyed the different way of teaching and the more artistic approach, but they had their feet on the ground and I would have liked my son to have a teacher like that.

One of the things I liked about the Steiner philosophy when i read up about it was the nuturing of the child as an individual in their work; however this did not come across in the school that I saw.  All of the artwork in each class was nearly identical (where is the indiviualism there?) the same being with the beeswax modelling.  A lot of the stuff I’m convinced the teachers did and fobbed it off as the childrens.

There are quite a lot of sites of “survivors of Steiner” which are very interesting and rather scary if anyone wants to do a google search.  It seems that bullying is a real issue aswell as purposely withholding information from parents (one father wrote that at the start of the year parents are requested not to ask their children what they do in school) aswell as the very strong anthroposophy that can often take over the school.