If you’ve been around in education for a while, you certainly have seen the cycling of educational trends from those that favor a more child-centered, scaffolding, developmental point of view of learning (like myself and many of you who may frequent this blog) and those who believe in a more rigorous, back-to-basics, paper and pencil, earlier-is-better academic skills acquisition. Decade to decade the tug of war seems to go back and forth with one side gaining a little favor over the other. In harder ecomomic time, particularly in the USA, the back-to-basics approach is touted as being the only answer to solve the problem of global competition.

Interesting, then, that this week the Wall Street Journal should run a page one story on Germany’s growing movement of Waldkindergartens, or “forest” kindergartens where five year olds in about 700 programs thoughout Germany are spending their days outdoors playing in the woods with their teachers instead of being drilled with letters and numbers and keyboarding skills. In an apparent return to principles long ago espoused by the father of kindergarten philosophy, Friedrich Frobel, some German early childhood educators and parents are seeing the value of postponing the stress and rush to early academics as we think of them today in American classrooms. The Journal reports that this idea is gaining some interest in other countries and notes one such program in Portland, Oregon.