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[quote=Anonymous]I used to work as a school psychologist that was very close to a Waldorf School. Federal education law says public schools are in charge of testing private school students who might need special education. The way our district did it is the public school closest to the private school had to complete the assessments.

It was really tragic to assess students in third and fourth grades who couldn't read. Waldorf holds off teaching reading until 2nd grade because as one teacher there told me the student has to develop a positive relationship with reading and writing and "it will just click when they are ready".

While some kids do pick up reading effortlessly, for many, many children learning to read can be a long hard slog. At least 40 percent of children really need direct intensive instruction in phonics to learn to read in English. People love to say look at Finland -the kids play all day until  7 then they go on to do well in school. Well Finnish is a phonetic language where letters make one sound so it is easy to learn how to read. German is also a phonetically consistent language unlike English which is just crazy hard to learn to read and spell because of all the phonetic inconsistencies. So Steiner didn't think it took that much instruction to learn to read.

So I really have a negative view of Waldorf. [/quote]

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