[dzhiurgis]

I went to one near me just to check it out. They started to moan about public education system and seemed want to be alternative for the sake of it. Some parents I know there are definitely on a woo-woo spectrum. School system in NZ is already a lot like montessori with heaps of fluidity.

p.s. I’ve been joking that soon you won’t be able to take your kid anywhere without a montessori/waldorf/reggio franchise.

[sersi]

The thing is Montessori doesn't mean anything. Any school can call themselves Montessori. So it all depends on actual accreditation. Some accreditations are also not worth the paper they're printed on (like NAMC). AMI and AMS are considered to be the two most serious accreditation

My son's school is AMI accredited and at least there's not much woo-woo here. Children have to be up to date with vaccination (or they're not admitted), only thing slightly woo-woo (from the local point of view) is that the parents who chose this school chose it because they want their kid to have more of a play-based, child directed education and don't want them to have homework and tuition in kindergarten. This is in HK where a lot of children going to public schools will have homework and will get tuition in order to prepare for the primary school entrance exam (and later to the middle school entrance exam).

On the other hand, Waldorf is fully woo-woo. They claim that children should not be taught to read before they get their first adult teeth and have a bunch of very weird racist myth about reincarnation (read up on anthroposophy)

[dzhiurgis]

NZ primary schools have no homework and are play based too, hence why it made little sense to me.

[foxglacier]

Sounds like Montessori is healthier than public HK schools but it's more borderline in NZ, as parent said. Nobody has homework in kindergarten there!

Yea Steiner is woo-woo but so what? Most people are woo-woo (religion) and perhaps old Rudolf realized it has some value in human development. The specific details of the woo hardly matter.

As I see it, the main values of Steiner are the close community and the not forcing them to do logical thinking in Piaget's preoperational stage (before 7 years old), which Rudolf seems to have interpreted as play-play-play all day-day-day, but that might be fine.

[sersi]

Yes, public schools in Asian countries tend to be very problematic to say the least. New Zealand, Australia and Europe tend to have vastly better schools when it comes to respecting the child's need to play. I do see the value of things being child-directed versus being play based but directed by the teacher (like I had as a kid in France) and that for me is the benefit of Reggio Emilia and Montessori.

To be fair, I also wouldn't put my kid in a religious school :) But yes, I agree there's some good ideas with waldorf. Personally though if I had been told when I was a kid not read before 7, I would have been rather pissed off.