Struwwelpeter 2.0

10
Media competency and Waldorf education
Indirect and direct media education
Dr. Edwin Hübner
Technology saves people from having
to do things although as a result they
face the risk of losing the corresponding
skills just like a muscle atrophies
if it is not used. Human beings
thus tend to be alienated from intentional
thinking and their own body
through technology: as active human
beings they are reduced to mere conceptual
thinking. This does not have
to be a problem for adults who can
find the corresponding counterbalance.
For them the positive opportunities
of the world of technology thus
open up.
For children there is the fundamental
problem that they first of all have to
develop their body. In a development
which takes many years, they have
to develop their physical, emotional
and intellectual abilities as the indispensable
basis for obtaining media
competency.
Direct media education, which enables
the growing human being to use media
in a meaningful way, must therefore
be preceded by indirect media education
which schools precisely those
abilities in human beings which they
require to be equal to the challenges
of life and thus at the same time the
demands which the technical media
world makes of them.
That is why all education in the
present time is media education:
education today and in the future
must proceed on the basis that young
people grow up in a technical media
world. That does not mean, however,
that somehow media have to be present
in each lesson. On the contrary: as
the primary developmental task of the
child is to develop and master their
own physical and emotional forces,
education has to begin by supporting
their healthy development. It therefore
has to ensure, on the one hand,
that children find many activities in
their surroundings which stimulate
them to develop their physical and
mental abilities in a healthy and
rounded way. On the other hand it has
to be ensured that everything which
would hinder such physical and mental
development is excluded. Indirect
media education therefore tries to
make sure that in the first years of
life to the time when the child is
ready for school technical media do
not play any role in the child’s life.