Has anyone come across any weirdness in Oak Meadow high school histories?

[Shelly in IL]

I mean political/sociological mumbo jumbo? I see from a post on the k-8 board it has some roots in a "Steiner" movement. I looked up Rudolph Steiner - looks a bit odd. Just curious about their philosophy, because I would really like to use their high school texts.

[SkateLeft]

Steiner was a pretty nutty guy, in my opinion. He founded a movement called anthroposophy.

 

I have some of the elementary and middle school materials and have not seen anything explicitly anthroposophical, other than in the K-3 teacher manuals that are sold separately from the curriculum ("Heart of Learning" and the "Home Teacher's Process Manual"), both of which I sold within weeks of purchasing them many years ago.

 

OM used to be very popular among the homeschoolers in our little California college town when we first started homeschooling. The story I heard was that OM choose to distance themselves from the Waldorf movement because the legal debate about whether or not Waldorf was a religious form of education, though they kept some of the underlying principles in their educational philosophy.

 

I don't know how true that is, but I do know that right around the time my oldest started kindergarten, they revamped their curriculum. Most of the Waldorf influence is found in the lower grades, and my Waldorf purist friends claim that the Waldorf elements are very watered down. It's basically some Waldorf methodology without the anthroposophy slant.

 

I've been very comfortable with OM as a secular curriculum choice. :) I'm planning on using the biology syllabus next year, and maybe the government one as well.