Guest Post by Rebecca Coleman: Childhood Perfected?

 A New Yorker by birth, Rebecca Coleman grew up in the close suburbs of Washington, D.C., in an academic family. A year spent in Germany, at the age of eight, would later provide the basis for the protagonist's background in "The Kingdom of Childhood." She first learned about the Waldorf School movement at age 14 and quickly developed a fascination with its culture and philosophies. After studying elementary education for several years at the University of Maryland, she graduated with a degree in English, awarded with honors, and speaks to writers' groups on the subjects of creative writing and publishing. She lives in suburban Maryland with her husband and their four young children.

 

Her debut novel, "The Kingdom of Childhood", while in manuscript form, was a semifinalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Competition.

Today, Rebecca is talking about her own personal experience with The Waldorf School.Thank you Rebecca for stopping bu today.

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I was a 14-year-old public school kid when I got my first glimpse of a Waldorf school, walking through its doors as a guest of my mother's co-worker, whose son was a student there. From the street it looked perfectly ordinary, but inside, it was a revelation. Breathtakingly beautiful drawings and paper cutouts, all made by the children, decorated its corridors; the classrooms for its youngest students were filled with handmade dolls, carved wooden figurines, baskets of wool yarn and colorful hooded capes for games of imagination. It made me think of the Three Bears' cottage, something out of a folk tale sprung to life. That day the school community gathered in the multipurpose room for a candlelit carol sing-- it was nearly Christmas. My starkest memory of that day is the rising panic I felt at being surrounded by all those wiggly children who each held a lit candle, and, at the same time, an overwhelming awe of the beauty around me.

Much like Judy, the main character in my novel, the school reminded me instantly of my classrooms in Germany, where I had lived for a year in the mid-1980s. In the years that followed, as I learned more and more about the Waldorf philosophy-- invented, as it was, by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s-- I identified strongly with its notions that children do well to be immersed in the rhythms of the seasons, working with materials made by nature. I believed, too, in the wisdom to be found in the subtext of the oldest fairy tales, and in setting a high value on the beauty of a child's environment. Waldorf school, to me, seemed like childhood perfected.

My oldest son, James, began Waldorf preschool just before he turned 4. I was a very young mother, and it felt like a true victory to have won him a spot at the school. I didn't think it mattered that James was obsessed with all things soldier-related, because that's common with boys that age, and knights are a common motif in Waldorf stories and toys. I couldn't have been more wrong.

            
 We lasted one semester there. Nearly every day, his teacher greeted me at the door with a negative report about his behavior. It seemed the kid couldn't do anything right; even when he painted, he painted wrong, because he wanted to use multiple colors and paint objects, which was not allowed. When the teacher set out wooden planks for creative play, James encouraged his classmates to build ramps to climb the bookshelves; when she gave them a basket of rocks (indoors!), he threw them. Bewildered by his teacher's constant criticism, I told her the always-effective method for correcting James: tell him to stop. But that was not the Waldorf way; the method is to redirect the child. That didn't work with James, and so she kept tearing her hair out, and he, blissfully ignorant that he was doing anything wrong, kept returning to his own great ideas. 

The breaking point came when she told me the other children were ostracizing him because of his behavior. This put me into a complete panic. The next day I came in to observe him on the playground, hoping to discern the reason why my child was an outcast. Instead, I watched as he appointed himself the construction manager of an epic project in the sand pit; one child after another came up to him asking to be assigned their role. He wasn't an outcast at all-- he was a leader. He was popular. I knew then that we needed to leave. I loved the philosophy with all my heart, but I couldn't leave my exuberant, free-spirited boy in a place where he was the sticky nail that needed to be hammered down.

James is 13 now, and now and then I look at him and wonder what his first teacher would think if she could see him today-- my incredibly funny son, smart and friendly and very well-behaved, whose favorite place in the world is the Shakespeare drama camp he attends every summer. His personality hasn't changed a bit since he was four years old-- but luckily, he has been surrounded by wonderful teachers who value him for who he is. I still keep one of his Waldorf preschool paintings on the wall-- a reminder of my hope to give him a happy childhood, and how that precious wish was granted to us after all, just not in the way I expected.  

I don't assume that all Waldorf classrooms are like my son's-- not at all. I still have great affection for the philosophy. In The Kingdom of Childhood, Zach finds wisdom and strength in what he has learned as a Waldorf student, even as the entire ideal of protected innocence has broken down for him in the most egregious ways. Truly, it's the rare institution that won't, at some point, let us down-- but it doesn't mean we have to discard what beauty and truth we found within it. Life is a process of gathering