Featured Article
A Look at Waldorf and Montessori Education
in the Early Childhood Programs
by Barbara Shell
This comparison of Waldorf and Montessori educational philosophies is based on my
personal experience as a teacher in both Montessori and Waldorf school systems. I would
like to preface my remarks by stressing that there can be much difference from one
classroom to another in any philosophy, due to the style and interpretation of the
individual teacher.
Although the young child is viewed with great respect and reverence in both
philosophies, there are several areas of contrast between Waldorf and Montessori,
including their approach to play, fantasy, toys, social development, structure and order,
and intellectualism.
Play, fantasy and toys
In Montessori, there is a feeling that young children have difficulty distinguishing
between reality and fantasy, and therefore fantasy should be postponed until the child is
firmly grounded in reality. The tasks and activities the children do are reality oriented.
Montessori said that it is a mistake for children to amuse themselves with toys, that
children are not really interested in toys for long without the real intellectual interest of
associating them with sizes and numbers. In Montessori, each manipulative material is
focused toward a specific learning concept and has a step-by-step procedure for being
used. Math counting rods, for example, are not to be transformed into castle walls.
In Waldorf philosophy, play is viewed as the work of the young child. The magic of
fantasy, which is so alive in every young child, is an integral part of how the teacher
works with the child. The teacher incorporates storytelling and fantasy into the
curriculum.
In Waldorf, we feel that it is essential to realize the value of toys to help children to
re-enact experiences from life as they actually happen. The less finished and the more
suggestive a toy may be, the greater its educational value, for it really enlivens the
imaginative life of the child. So toys in the Waldorf kindergarten may be rounds of wood
cut from birch logs, seashells, lengths of colored silk or cotton for costuming or house
building, soft cloth dolls with a minimum of detail in faces or clothing, etc., allowing for
open-ended imaginative play.
Waldorf’s emphasis on play in early childhood is well expressed by Joseph Chilton
Pearce, in his book Magical Child, when he writes “The great rule is: play on the surface
and the work takes place beneath. For the child, the time is always now; the place, here;
the action, me. He has no capacity to entertain adult notions of fantasy world and real
world. He knows only one world, and that is the very real one in which and with which
he plays. His is not playing at life. Play is life.”
As Piaget expressed it, “Play is a reality which the child is disposed to believe in
when by himself, just as reality is a game at which he is willing to play with the adult and
anyone else who believes in it.... thus we have to say of the child’s play that it constitutes