By Eric Nakano, Staff Editor
In the heart of Silicon Valley, the children of tech executives and engineers attend schools that shun computers. Instead, children at the Waldorf schools learn vocabulary through bean bag exercises, fractions through dividing up food, and problem solving through knitting. While these schools readily acknowledge that their students may not perform well on standardized tests since they do not teach to them, they point to the high percentage of students who go on to attend prestigious universities. Critics point out, however, that students who attend these schools are likely to attend college anyway since their families place a premium on education and have the means to send them. It would be interesting to see if a similar model could be implemented through a Waldorf-inspired charter school, allowing for more direct comparisons to be made over the long run between students at standard public schools and those in a Waldorf-inspired charter school.