Your Source for 'Ff'lo

I have a few thoughts. First, while my step-brother teaches at a Waldorf school (and is raising his daughter in that methodology) I'm deeply suspicious of the Waldorf methods. My suspicions were initially aroused by a salon.com article I read a while back:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/05/26/waldorf/
"But a growing group of parents, teachers and students who've left the Waldorf system are troubled by the way the schools interpret Steiner's philosophies. Waldorf "survivors," as they very seriously call themselves, accuse Waldorf schools of encouraging a cultlike loyalty to Steiner's philosophy, which was founded on racist and anti-Semitic beliefs and which incorporates a host of unconventional educational methods -- like delaying reading and writing until children are 7."

I read through the pdf you linked to. Most of the complaints about early reading aren't about early reading per se (thought one seemed to be). Rather, the complaints were focused on the many activities that compete for "play time". So, early reading if it subtracts from time to play is bad. Time in front of a screen if it subtracts from time to play is bad. To some extent these critiques must be correct. The foundation of human knowledge is embodied experience and so play must be a critical part of learning -- especially early learning. But there is more to embodied experience than "play." Or, to put it another way, we shouldn't define "play" too narrowly. For example, my mother took me (as a little child -- pre-school) to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Science Center, and Cranbrook Institute of Science etc. I loved (and still do) exploring museums. Isn't that also play? She also read to me constantly and I taught myself to read by the time I was 3 through the experience of reading with her. Isn't that a kind of play too? Sometimes I played computer games with friends -- we'd build an imaginary scenario around the video game such that the game became part of a larger imaginary game we were playing. Isn't that play too? And yes, I also played outside with friends in the nearby woods. Some of the authors in the pdf you linked to seem to be sliding close to an anemic (and rigid) definition of "play" and I'm wary to go there. From the pdf it doesn't seem that a balanced push for early childhood literacy is harmful.