Chicago Waldorf School

I was overjoyed when we discovered Chicago Waldorf School for our daughter. I had been teaching freshman philosophy courses and pondering the evident shortcomings of the secondary educational system from which my students had come. Most distressing was the lack of higher cognitive ability, the seeming incapacity to perform any cognitive task listed in Bloom’s taxonomy apart from repeating information in the same form it was given. How, I wondered, were the schools so concerned with head starts, earlier emphasis on math, reading and science, and exhaustive testing achieving seemingly less in these areas than a generation before? (This estimation was shared by many of my colleagues at the time). My first acquaintance with Waldorf education provided me with some answers: at CWS, the focus is on balance between the cognitive, feeling and physical aspects of the child and age-appropriate challenges geared toward the developmental shifts in the child’s natural growth. Evidence of the success of this approach was on display at the open house we attended: written reports by the high school students that exemplified an expansive cognitive capacity absent in many of my college students, combined with a loving and aesthetic sensibility in their hand-drawn illustrations as well as their many hand-crafts and art projects. The disproportionate emphasis on the intellectual in the city schools, and the ensuing enfeeblement of the child’s learning capacities, even in precisely those same intellectual skill areas, is something I most emphatically wished to avoid in my own children’s education.

But CWS has meant still more to me as a parent than a school whose educational philosophy I can trust. Since enrolling my daughter in parent-child classes at 18 months, I have received, through parent-child and the numerous talks and programs with speakers from the greater Waldorf community, loads of invaluable parenting advice and methods, invaluable to me in so far as I had no experience of working with small children and was the first of my friends to become a father. I recommend CWS without reservation to all my friends who are now having children.

Quite simply, my children love going to school! Chicago Waldorf understands children and the many different stages they experience and teaches accordingly. When I first attended the Chicago Waldorf Open House, I thought, "I want to go to school here." The teachers are caring, incredibly creative, fun, intelligent, hard working, and wonderful role models. When comparing schools, we liked the fact that Waldorf does not limit education to inside the classroom. The children spend time learning outdoors everyday as well. We were fascinated by the extraordinary thought and care that goes into every lesson. The values are evident through a Waldorf Education which teaches our children to be well rounded caring individuals, as well as effective contributing members of society as a whole. This is no ordinary school; it is truly something very special to both the children who attend and their parents.