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–continued from page 10 Meanwhile, more and more screen time is trending among middle- and lower-income families. Totally online preschools are reportedly proliferating. In these free programs, funded by government and nonprofits, 3- and 4-year-olds learn nursery rhymes and letter sounds from a computer in their home without ever interacting with classmates or a live teacher. Opponents of such programs say that screen life is a poor substitute for real life. Preschool is mainly meant to prepare children to work well with others, to curb antisocial tendencies and to develop creativity, communication and social skills. None of that can be accomplished online, experts say. What’s more, child development depends upon utilization of all the senses, educators agree. Learning by looking at objects behind glass screens and listening to disembodied voices is no substitute for communicating eye to eye with other humans and experiencing the sensory stimuli that come, for example, from playing with real blocks, touching real animals and flowers or learning to write with pencil and paper rather than on a screen. A toddler can learn to identify a rose on a screen but will not experience the rose’s scent, its velvety petals or the prick of a thorn. The rose’s actual properties will remain unknown. A child learning about a real rose with a caring adult present will have all the sensory experiences and the benefit of a person to discuss them with. In April, the World Health Organization issued a new set of guidelines stating that babies under 1 should not be exposed to electronic screens, and “limiting or in some cases eliminating screen time for children under the age of 5 results in healthier adults.” Meanwhile, a groundbreaking study of more than 11,000 children is being conducted by the National Institutes of Health to determine the effects of screen time on children’s brain development. Preliminary results of children’s brain scans show that those who’ve spent multiple hours per day glued to a screen experience a thinning of 12 | ARROYO | 08.<strong>19</strong>
The Waldorf Way To find out more about the Waldorf philosophy on technology, we talked with Erin Semin, the Pasadena Waldorf School’s pedagogical administrator. (There’s no title of principal at the school.) What is the Waldorf policy on tech? Waldorf is definitely anti-tech for lower grades. With the youngest children, we ask parents not to expose them to any tech at all. We work very strongly with parents starting in preschool to advocate for playtime, social time and creative time over screen time. In school we use no technology until seventh and eighth grade, when they start computer-based research projects under a teacher’s guidance. the cerebral cortex. That’s the layer of neural tissue responsible for processing information from each of the five senses. Other test results show that thinking and language-development skills are demonstrably lower for children who spend two hours a day or more gazing at screens. And a Canadian study released this year by the University of Calgary’s psychology department indicates that children ages 2 through 5 who experience high levels of screen time get lower test scores in communication, problem-solving and social and motor skills than those with little screen time. Many, if not most, of America’s families have not yet gotten the message. Children of middle- and low-income parents, from infancy onward, are increasingly building with virtual blocks, reading Goodnight Moon on tablets and learning to draw, spell and identify objects via digital devices. The new online preschools and public elementary schools use computers in classes and ask that homework be done on them. At any moderate-price restaurant you’ll see toddlers in high chairs fiddling with phones and tablets to keep them diverted while parents dine and chat. Kids traveling in cars watch screens rather than observe the passing scene while talking with their parents about it. Attachments to cribs allow infants lying on their backs to stare up at tablets programmed to play ageappropriate diversions. Some studies have shown that many grade-school children spend up to seven hours per day looking at screens in classrooms and then at home. And experts say that the more technology children are exposed to, the less human engagement occurs. Or, as one pundit put it: “Human engagement is becoming a luxury item.” Indeed, middle- and lower-income families, even with two working parents, can rarely afford private nannies or the cost of a tech-free private school such as the Waldorf schools, reportedly a favorite with Silicon Valley’s top-tier tech execs. Kindergarten tuition at the Pasadena Waldorf School in Altadena is about $25,000 per child. What’s the bottom line? All parents should be mindful of and cut back on children’s screen time, as well as their own screen time while with their children. But they needn’t panic. No longterm studies have yet been done to determine whether brain changes in children are permanent or temporary. And no studies yet address whether children who are heavy screen users will actually fare worse as adults than those who are raised without screens. Such research is still in its infancy. But common sense dictates that children raised with communicative adults and even the simplest shared real-life experiences will probably be emotionally, socially and intellectually better off than those who are abandoned by adults to a constant diet of screens. |||| What’s so wrong with tech, from the Waldorf perspective? It runs counter to the way the brain wants to develop. As a child moves through the world, they’re having sensory, social, movement and motor planning [the ability to plan and carry out a skilled motor act] experiences. Each of these experiences creates a pathway in their brain, an actual physical, neural pathway. There are points in development where, in order for the brain to grow, the pathways that are not well used or well traveled have to be cleared away. And so what a child spends much time doing has long-term effect. The more you do a certain thing, the more myelenated , or cemented, that brain pathway becomes. A child who is frequently outside observing nature, running, jumping and falling has well protected pathways for motor planning and executive functioning, for reasoning with the relative dangers in life. One who spends a lot of time with a screen that’s two or three inches from the face will have a lot of visual input pathways but few motor ones well established. A child sitting in a high chair at a dinner table, watching grownups converse, and every now and then a grownup converses with the child, who may also be figuring out how big a stack of sugar cubes they can build, that child is working on patience, learning social skills and cues and learning a kind of syntax of human conversation and relationships. A child at a table with a phone in front of him, not paying attention to anything else, is not using pathways shaped by their own experiences but only absorbing what the producer of that program has decided a 2- or 3-year-old would be interested in. What’s the difference between, say, building with blocks or digging in sand on a screen and in real life? To click and drag a cursor on a screen is simply a fine motor and visual panning activity. Yet the program tells you that you have just dug a hole or built a castle. A child who is not on a screen but in the world will learn that you need a shovel and sand and it takes hours to build a hole that’s big enough to stand in. So the child has a realistic sense of the physical effort it takes to produce change in the world. The child also gets a better basis for future physics, chemistry and math learning when he or she builds with real blocks. Stacking the blocks, you sense how heavy they are, you know intrinsically that different size blocks will hurt differently if they fall on your foot, and that certain ways of building will be more wobbly than others. This becomes the basis for intellectual learning later on. Students can work not just with a concept, but can marry that concept to what they’ve already learned in life. —B.L. |||| 08.<strong>19</strong> | ARROYO | 13
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Page 42 and 43: HAPPY Lauren Schneider CAMPERS Chil
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