Thu, 31 May 2007

Celebrity ambassador for Waldorf education

By Christian von Arnim

LONDON (NNA) – Waldorf schools in Britain were lent a touch of celebrity last Friday when former glamour model turned Waldorf mum Melinda Messenger talked on a breakfast time TV show about her decision to send her children to a Waldorf school.

It was the feeling that her son’s needs were not being fully met at his primary school – he was four at the time, turning five - that first sent her looking for alternatives.

There just seemed too much pressure on the young child: “The school was fantastic, the teachers were wonderful, but I just was not happy. He was coming home, he was struggling to hold his pencil, he was trying to write out the letters, to learn the alphabet, and something just did not feel right,” she explained on ITV’s This Morning to a primetime breakfast audience.

At one point she even thought about starting her own school “with a real loving environment that is about educating the child and not about what the system wants from them,” but it was while she was investigating local schools as part of moving house that she came across Steiner Waldorf education.

“I just happened to walk into this one place and it was the answer to my dreams, to be honest with you. I fell in love with it: the whole ethos, the whole attitude.”

Challenged by one of the show’s presenters on the Waldorf practice of starting the teaching of reading and writing much later than in traditional British schooling, she passionately and convincingly argued the case for waiting until the child is developmentally ready before starting to teach numeracy and literacy skills.

“What difference does it really make, when you think of yourself as an adult, if you learn to read two years earlier or two years later. But if you knew that those extra two years made the world of difference in allowing that child to really physically develop and be everything they had to be and lay that really solid foundation, then don’t you think that two years would be worth it?”

When you looked at how well children had been educated in Steiner schools at the end of their school career “what you find more often than not is that you have very rounded individuals who do tend to be above average. So they haven’t been left behind.”

Academically they did just as well as, if not better, than other schools: “The level of what they learn is just phenomenal.”

“What the child is being given is so special and so valuable that they will carry it with them for the rest of their lives,” Melinda Messenger added.

The Waldorf curriculum is based on a pedagogical philosophy that places emphasis on the whole development of the child, including a child's spiritual, physical and moral well-being as well as academic progress. There is a strong emphasis on social abilities and the development of pre-numeracy and literacy skills. Formal learning begins later, and learning is done in a very creative and artistic environment, the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, representing Steiner schools in Britain, explains the Waldorf approach in its website. 

“What is the most important thing? It is educating our children and it is educating in a way that is healthy and right for them – not about statistics, not about league tables, not about form filling,” might well sum up what led Melinda Messenger to Waldorf education.

“We had to challenge our own ideas and our own preconceptions and that can be sometimes a bit difficult and a bit frightening and a bit scary, but I'm glad that we did."

Melinda Messenger first came to prominence in 1997 as a tabloid newspaper glamour model. Since then she has developed a career as a TV presenter and has acted in films and the theatre.

She is an advocate of children’s rights, supporting a number of charities including Action Aid, Barnados, and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. Last autumn she went as Action Aid ambassador to Malawi to visit projects providing help for AIDS orphans.

END/nna/cva

Link: www.steinerwaldorf.org.uk/

Item: 070531-01EN Date: 31 May 2007

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