After a Quarter Century

March 8th, 2025

A few days ago, Karin and I took our four-year-old grandson, Asher, to an orientation at the Tamarack Waldorf School on Milwaukee’s eastside. We plan on enrolling the boy into one of the kindergarten classes at the school for the fall semester. Karin and I are familiar with the school. Two of our children went there. Our youngest son was at Tamarack for kindergarten twenty-five years ago. My feelings about being there again are conflicted. It seems so strange to be starting this cycle again.

It would probably be helpful if I tried to explain what a Waldorf School is. People have written entire books describing Waldorf education, so I will give a very stripped-down version of what it is all about. Waldorf schools have a curriculum that is holistic in that each subject has some connection with every other one. Every grade level has a theme to it. The underlying assumption is that the development of an individual child resembles the course of all humanity history in microcosm. Each boy and girl reenact the journey of all mankind. I find that to be a remarkable idea, and it implies that every child is intrinsically of value.

The kindergarten is the start of the journey, and beginnings are important. There is an obsession in our culture to treat students as commodities. Schools, be they public or private, tend to groom children to become industrious worker bees, ambitious cogs in the corporate machine. They are told to be winners, whatever that means. I have had people encourage me to start teaching Asher how to read now. They tell me that he needs to get ahead, or at least not fall behind the kids in his age group. The Waldorf school will not push Asher or his classmates to be competitive this soon in life. They will learn how to socialize, how to draw, how to sing, and how use their imaginations while playing. In short, Asher will get a chance to be who he is, and right now he is just a little boy.

Asher got to spend an hour with other children in the kindergarten classroom while the adult caregivers talked in the room next door. The school building is old. It has to be a century old if not more. The windows are tall. The floors are all hardwood. Nearly everything in the classroom is made of natural materials. There are many things fashioned from wood or ceramics or cloth. Each kindergarten room has a loft that the kids can use as the tower of a castle or the bow of a pirate ship. Everything that exists in the classroom is there to stimulate a sense of wonder in the child. There was one plaything in particular that caught my fancy. It looked a bit like a model of a tree. There was a vertical wooden shaft with metal leaves surrounding it in a spiral pattern. The leaves on the top of the tree trunk were small and they increased in size as they got close to the base. Asher dropped a wooden ball from the top of the tree. The marble rolled and followed the spiral of metal leaves, and the ball struck a musical note upon bouncing off of each leaf. Each consecutive leaf rang a lower note as the ball descended. It sounded like somebody was playing a scale on a xylophone. Asher was delighted with the toy. So was I. The room had other objects just as fascinating.

While Asher was playing with his potential classmates, Karin and I sat with other adults to listen to a kindergarten teacher describe the class activities. Asher will play outside everyday regardless of the weather. He will go each day to a nearby park. He will listen to his teacher tell him stories. He will draw or paint or sculpt with beeswax. He will play games with the other kids. He will make friends. He will share snacks with them. He will become more human.

I felt sad. I wasn’t feeling that way because of Asher. I’m excited for him, perhaps even more excited than he is. I felt sad because our own children went to this school, and they still suffered mightily when they became adults. They have experienced enormous trauma in the years since they were Asher’s age. They were like Asher at one time, just little kids, and now their innocence is long gone. Was their time in a Waldorf kindergarten of use to them? Did it prepare them at all for the challenges they faced? Did it do any good?

I don’t know. I can never know. I do know that our grown-up kids are resilient and brave. Maybe being in a kindergarten like Asher’s gave them a chance to grow strong. Too many children never have the opportunity to be young. They are forced to grow up way too early, and that causes trouble later on in life. We want Asher to be little boy while he can. We want him to have a childhood.