BULLETIN
November-December 2010
Parenting Unplugged Table of Contents
By: Cat Greenstreet, Lower School Chair & Eileen Diskin, Director of Alumni Relations
Television, movies, personal DVD players, computers, video games, cell phones, iPods 1-4 Parenting Unplugged – the world of technology is unendingly inviting and its place in the modern world Main Lessons 5 continues to grow. For most of us, if we’re through the grades not plugged in, we feel disconnected from the world. When I was raising my son Social Inclusion 6 without television in the ’90s, my parents were alarmed that we were depriving him Sports at Steiner 7 of all it could offer educationally. Now the demand for exposure to media and tech8-11 Notes from Inside nology has exponentially increased. It’s not enough to watch the news on televi12 Community sion, many must have other simultaneous Marketplace streams of communication and information, such as the CNN “live ticker” bringing the news on their computer desktop, while also checking twitter or facebook. When much of the world equates technology with connection, why do we at the Rudolf Steiner School ask you to unplug your children from media? We want to foster human beings who are connected to the kingdoms of nature and the planet itself as well as to their fellow human beings. Here is a snapshot of what we are doing at each level of education and the effect the media has upon it. The cornerstone of an early Waldorf education is the cultivation of self-directed play. Rather than teaching our children colors and numbers in their nursery years or reading and arithmetic in the kindergarten, we
give them the opportunity to discover the world around them. Every item the child plays with encourages imaginative thinking. Dolls with non-descript faces, wooden stoves, rocks and logs – the children transform these objects into something that feeds and helps form their imaginative play. Exposure to fast-paced, glitzy or shocking media images interferes with the child’s ability to experience the natural and the relational world in a free way. “Media” is a good term as it actually mediates or “serves as an intermediary” between the child and sense experiences. Young children learn through imitation and, therefore, take on the characters, actions and intentions behind what they see as if they were their own. In the classroom, not only do they have attention difficulties, they also act out everything they have seen; if this involves something on TV or on a DVD, it makes it difficult for the whole class to engage and express themselves freely in creative play. We are ultimately faced with a growing number of ways in which media interferes with what we expect the children in our school to be able to do and to be. As the children enter the elementary school, they interact with a teacher who brings a rich imaginative curriculum, stories that have nurtured humanity throughout the centuries: fairy tales, fables, hero stories, myths. They meet the world of numbers