SARAH: Hi, I'm Sarah Baldwin.
Welcome back to "Sunday with Sarah". I've been gone the past week, I was out in
California doing college visits with my son, William, who's joining me here today.
Thank you for agreeing to do this, honey.
WILL: No problem.
SARAH: So William is just finishing his junior year of high school and applied
to a special program at USC,
the University of Southern California. He was invited to apply to a program where if
he was accepted he gets to begin college a year early, skip his senior year of
high school and start in the fall as a freshman.
It's a very competitive program so he applied last fall but we didn't think
too much about it and assumed he'd do another year of high school until this
spring he got a big fat envelope, an acceptance letter. Aside from
that one application we hadn't really done the college visit thing and hadn't
looked at other schools so spring break week
William and I headed out to California.
We visited USC and then some other schools he's interested in just to
compare. During our trip and during this time I started thinking a
lot about
my kids' Waldorf education and how it prepared them for college and adulthood
and the future. I thought this would be a great opportunity to have William
come and have a conversation with me about his own thoughts as a Waldorf alum.
What I think is really interesting is that in your childhood, in your early
childhood years up to,
oh, say middle school, you and your brother weren't exposed to much media.
You didn't watch TV,
you didn't watch many movies and you didn't really have computer access
except when you would sneak on, but
Harper has gone on to, he's a junior in film school,
he's a filmmaker and what are you planning to major in college?
WILL: Computer science. SARAH: Well how do you explain that?
WILL: Well, I think a lot of it has to do, actually, with not having access to those
things early on because I think when they're sort of there and they're just
something that you use every day from a very early age,
you kind of just see them as these facts of life. You don't see them as
tools so much as toys, maybe. I guess, well, not this kind of toy but that
you're not as interested in the "behind the scenes" of
how they work and how they're made.
You know, films or computer programs, that sort of thing. I think that
without sort of a lot of creative play that you might just see them as, you know,
something that's designed to entertain you.
SARAH: Right, so you're saying children who spent a lot of time, they're
passive, those who are consuming, watching TV,
playing video games,
they're kind of passively consuming those media images. So that kind of
supports what I always tell parents and what Rudolf Steiner believed, the
founder of Waldorf education, believed strongly that children who spend their
childhoods playing creatively and out of their own imaginations,
those are the children who can go on to become the creative thinkers, the
inventors, the innovators later in life and a lot of research has borne this out.
A lot of parents are concerned too that children in Waldorf
school won't be prepared for high school and college.
We don't have a Waldorf high school here in our community in Maine, there is one
at the Merriconeag Waldorf School, it's more than an hour south of here so
that wasn't an option, but tell us a little bit about the high school you go to.
WILL: I go to a high school called the Watershed School. It's a very small
school, it has about twenty four kids, but in a lot of ways I think it's
very similar to the Waldorf school that I went to for elementary and middle school.
There aren't a lot of tests — there are tests but there's
not as much emphasis placed on them and there's a lot more focus, I
think, on creative thinking and sort of going outside just studying for
tests and trying to get, you know, the grade.
Which I think is a good thing, that when tests are used they're
used to just make sure students are understanding everything and on the
right track, that they're not being used to gauge whether the student is, you know,
"smart" or "good".
And I think it's similar in a lot of ways, in the way it sort
of fosters creative thinking. SARAH: And I know you were really worried during your
high school years that, your school doesn't give grades and doesn't have
AP tests and the resources of a much bigger high school, you were worried that
you wouldn't be able to get into a good college but now you've just been
accepted to a program that has an 8 percent acceptance rate in spite of not
having grades. You have, like a Waldorf school, written reports that tell you
much more than a a letter can about your interest in the class, how you contribute
to the class and your performance and whether or not your work is done,
it tells you so much more. And I think admissions,
I know that admissions officers and colleges do take the time to read those
kinds of reports and are looking for students from alternative educational
settings, including homeschoolers. Homeschoolers too bring so much interest
in subjects, often, and lifelong learning.
WILL: I think there's been more focus on really learning and pursuing passions,
not to say that all public schools go against this, but
I think if a student has had a background in that creative sort of environment —
I think that there's a lot of difference between that and somebody
who's been on the college track getting the
4.0 GPA and getting all the tests.
It's not this environment where it's about the learning and
the passion for it, it's more about proving you can take tests well.
So I think a lot of students from a background that's had
more of the almost Waldorf ideals to it, I think there's a
lot more potential, or maybe not potential but a lot more chance that
they're going to be creative and less focused on making sure that
they have a 4.0 GPA and more focused on really connecting
with the problem. SARAH: Right, because I'd say both Waldorf education and your high school
are very experiential learning. When you do science it's really hands-on. I think
when you have a living experience of things
it goes much deeper and the memory stays with you much more deeply than
just memorizing facts for tests and spitting it back out on a test and moving
on.
So thank you for sharing a little bit with me today.
I urge you to read the study on Waldorf graduates that I will post on
my blog. Some statistics from that study show that 94 percent of
Waldorf graduates go on to attend college or university.
88 percent of those students, of Waldorf graduates, end up
graduating from college.
42 percent choose science as a major and 47 percent choose
humanities as a major.
91 percent are active in lifelong education and 92
percent placed a high value on critical thinking. This is a quote from a
professor, a biology professor at Mount Holyoke College,
Stan Rachootin, and this quote is very similar to many of the comments I hear from
teachers at our local public high school when they encounter our Waldorf
graduates.
He wrote "The Waldorf student I taught had a breath of interest, willingness to
explore new areas and make connections to what she already knew,
artistic sense, and an ability to apply it to scientific problems.
She also brought a strong, highly individualistic though non-sectarian
spiritual sense to her work. Her world was larger and more interesting than herself."
So I realize, in talking to you, that not all of you have children in a
Waldorf school.
Not all of you have the opportunity for Waldorf education and many of you will
choose other paths of learning. This isn't to say Waldorf education is the
only way or the best way,
there are so many ways to engender love of learning in students and so much of
what they experience in their home life with you will influence them and
your attitudes toward life and learning will influence them. But I bring
this to you today mostly to dispel the myths that Waldorf education is all
fairies and make believe and doesn't adequately prepare students for high
school and college.
I'm here to tell you I've seen many students go through eight grades at our
local Waldorf school — more than eight grades, early childhood, 10 grades —
and go on to become really creative, thoughtful, successful adults and I
bring you one example here today. So thank you so much for tuning in.
As always I welcome your comments, your thoughts, your questions. Please leave
them as a comment on the blog and I'll see you again next week.
Have a great week, bye-bye.