Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

146
ment then the development of the brain can be harmed, according to
Borbonus. Creativity, imagination and intelligence fall by the wayside. From
long educational practice he observes that children are impeded through
lack of primary experience in developing their sense of warmth and balance,
their sense of smell and taste and their sense of touch and motion.
The lack of adequate playgrounds and stimulating surroundings in a big
city contributes to and reinforces the deficiency. Children need an environment
that promotes development. “Human warmth, play and movement
are indispensable”, according to Borbonus.
Disastrous Consequences of a False Paradigm
One thing is obvious: the roots of the problem reach deep into the
common habits and living conditions of our time. Speech problems are
just the tip of an iceberg that starts to threaten our entire culture and
civilisation. Big efforts will be necessary to correct these tendencies. The
prospects of success will be small if we do not succeed in changing something
decisively in ourselves, in our habitual way of thinking. Take the
habit of wanting to grasp everything that is linked with speaking and listening
with the purely technical model of sending and receiving, of input
and output, as if we were dealing with an information exchange between
two computers. This view is circulating widely in scientific communities
today, and has been applied to the complex process of speech acquisition in
children. It is claimed that this process just depends on the right input
from the surroundings and this could not be provided better than through
radio and television, as hardly any adult ever attains the speaker’s perfectly
trained language-use, not to mention the wealth of other educational possibilities
that radio and television provide. It is claimed that television is the
ideal source of learning for small children and nowhere can speech development
be better promoted.
We see how grotesquely this view is divorced from reality when in
1996, Sally Ward, a leading English academic in the area of speech development
in children, presented the results of ten years of research. She found
out that 20 per cent of the investigated children by nine months of age
proved to be behind in development when parents had used television as a
baby-sitter. If television viewing was continued, most of the children at
three years of age were one year behind: that means they spoke the language
of a two-year old - a circumstance that endangered their whole development.
When parents showed insight and switched the television off,
replacing it with direct contact with the child, then the nine month old
baby could be brought back to a normal stage of development within four
months, through nothing but words: words spoken by their parents - live!
In 1990 many scientists still considered it to be a cruel idea to expose children
in their first years of life exclusively to speech through electronic media
in order to find out if they could learn to speak that way. Now this idea
for an experiment has become cruel reality, and it teaches us that speech
coming out of a loudspeaker does not have the same effect as the speech of
an adult in direct contact with the child. Coming from a loudspeaker it