BENJAMIN KRANZ was at the bottom of his class in reading and math.
Kicked out of the choir in the third grade, he refused to take music.
``He didn't like school,'' his mother, Janet Kranz, says. ``With years of schooling ahead of him, I knew I had to do something.''
Kranz went looking for a new school for Benjamin, now 10. She found the Waldorf School in the Yellow Pages. Then she discovered the Waldorf philosophy of education.
Waldorf expert Dorothy Olsen, in Winnipeg at a conference to organize a Waldorf school here, says the schools grow from the inside out.
``They emerge and develop wherever a group of parents decides this is the education they want for their children,'' Olsen says. ``It's high time there was one in Winnipeg.''
A Waldorf school is an educational wonderland of fairy tales, myths and legends; of music, art, physics demonstrations, class plays and seasonal festivals; of work books written and illustrated by students.
It is a school without exams, grades, computers or televisions.
A Waldorf school is a place where the standard ideas and practices of education don't apply.
``It was the right place for Ben,'' Kranz says. Enrolled last September in the Parsifal School, one of two Waldorf schools in Ottawa, he ``is doing incredibly well,'' she adds.
``Ben has rediscovered joie de vivre,'' Kranz says. In less than a year, a boy who refused to sing is learning to play the recorder and is ``talking about taking up the cello.''
Waldorf education began in Germany in 1919, a few months after the end of the First World War.
Sickened by global conflict, industrialist Emil Molt, director of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette company in Stuttgart, asked Rudolf Steiner, a scientist and a philosopher, to design a school that would enable human beings to create a just and peaceful soci ety.
Waldorf schools have acquired an elitist reputation because only the well-to-do can afford to send their children.
But the first school was for the children of employees in Molt's Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory, hence the name Waldorf.
Some schools identify themselves as Rudolf Steiner schools, a name interchangeable with Waldorf.
There are 16 Waldorf schools in Canada, about 100 in North America and about 500 worldwide.
Steiner maintained that the materialism underlying modern life was disastrous. He urged his followers to awaken to the spiritual origin of nature and destiny of the human being.
Waldorf schools emphasize the arts, Olsen says ``because imagination is the moral being of the human being.''
Students grow with the same teacher to Grade 4 or to Grade 8. Each class may also have four or five specialist teachers for languages, music, handwork and physical education.
``Children today have too many experiences and they aren't able to integrate them,'' Olsen says.
In the primary grades, children at a Waldorf learn to knit, do geometry, and play the recorder.
Reading and math is not taught until children are at least seven.
Waldorf philosophy is that play is the work of the young child, with the teacher incorporating storytelling and fantasy into the curriculum.
``It is essential to realize the value of toys to help children reenact experiences from life as they actually happen. The less finished and more suggestive a toy may be, the greater its educational value, for it enlivens the imaginative life of the child ,'' Olsen says.
Toys in a Waldorf kindergarten are rounds of wood cut from birch logs, sea shells, lengths of coloured natural fabric for costumes or house building, soft cloth dolls with a minimum of detail in faces or clothing. Each letter of the alphabet is brought to the child as a story.
For example, K is king, M is mountains, and W is waves. ``Nothing is presented to a child as an abstraction,'' Olsen says. ``The schools generally turn out young people who get into the colleges and universities of their choice, but more importantly are w ell prepared for life,'' Olsen says.
``Each child's attributes are built. Every child can find a place where they are the best.''
Diana Hughes, head of the Waldorf Teacher Education Program, Rudolf Steiner Centre in Toronto, says the Waldorf method is gaining acceptance in the public system.
The main difference between Waldorf and the public system is that ``we don't base . . . their intelligence on early reading skills,'' Hughes, said in an interview. ``The value (of the Waldorf method) has been proved again and again and again by full schol arships to Oxford and the University of Toronto.''
Education is divided in segments of seven years, birth to age seven, seven to 14 and 14 to 21. An assumption of Waldorf is the contrast between the physical process of growing down and the psychological process of ``waking up.''
A baby's head is already well formed at birth and by age seven a child's brain attains 90 per cent of its weight.
In the first seven years the growth forces are most active in developing the sense-nervous system which is centred in the head.
As growth continues, the emphasis shifts toward the trunk; changes include the elongation of the neck and later, the suggestion of a waist.
Waldorf recognizes that during the crucial years between seven and 14, a child needs and respects authority and the adult is viewed as a source of wisdom and guidance. The child gradually learns to be a social being.
``The development of the young child in the social realm is as important as anything else in Waldorf,'' Olsen says.
Waldorf sees the young child thriving in a structured world where he knows what he can count on from day to day and week to week.
There are set times for coming together and working as a whole group and times for playing individually or with friends, times for directed activity like crafts, baking or painting and times for creative play, retelling a story through movement, doing fin ger games, or watching a puppet show.
In the high school years, Waldorf focuses on abstract, intellectual thought. A Waldorf high school has much in common with a mainstream high school in terms of academics, Hughes says.
The main difference is that ``(Waldorf) consciously nurtures budding idealism and hunger for meaning.''
For example, Grade 12 in the Toronto Waldorf School culminates with a lesson devoted explicitly to the self, where students explore the nature of individuality through the myth of Prometheus, Emerson's essay, Self Reliance, and psychology from Freud to Ju ng to Maslow.
A child longs for rhythm and order in his world, Olsen says.
Waldorf recognizes this and feels that the physical setting needs an underlying order to help the child feel secure. Waldorf views the child as having all of his talents and faculties within himself from the start.
They unfold and develop slowly, like the petals of a maturing flower, as the child moves from one development stage to the next.
``The little child should experience goodness in the world, great awe and wonder. In a Waldorf preschool or kindergarten, we make it the most beautiful place that we possibly can.''
Ieva Jessons, chairwoman of the Winnipeg Waldorf Foundation, says the Waldorf group needs about $200,000 for two-years funding, as well as a building for the school. A teacher's annual salary would be about $40,000.
John Carlyle, deputy minister of education, says Manitoba does not finance independent schools that do not follow the provincial curriculum.
That means tuition for kindergarten children in a Waldorf school would be between $5,000 and $6,000 a year. Waldorf schools begin with kindergarten and add a grade each year.
``It's regrettable,'' that parents seek an alternative to the Manitoba system, Carlyle says.
Jessons, a teacher and principal of Keeseekoowenin School in Elphinstone for 12 years, says she is disillusioned with the public system.
``Western education produces soul hungry children.''
After a career spent teaching young children, Jessons says she has come to subscribe to the Waldorf method because it stresses the development of the individual.
Each child taught to understand his or her unique qualities also learns to respect and appreciate others, she says.
Joy MacLean, a Winnipeg lawyer and mother of two children, aged two and five, says she is looking for an alternative way of educating her children because the public system is ``horrible'' and ``inflexible.''
MacLean is exploring Waldorf because of its ``reverence for the child's spirit.'' Monique Delannoy, mother of two boys, aged six months and 22 months, says she believes in the Waldorf method ``to the core.''
Delannoy worked as an assistant to the kindergarten teacher at the Ottawa Waldorf School. Now she is working to establish a Waldorf school in Winnipeg. ``We have a group of about 15 parents a good small group and it's a strong group.''
About 25 people paid $30 each to attend the three-day conference last month.
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