Technology, Education and Children (Short Version)
When I talk to parents of children at Steiner schools, they are often concerned about how much time they should allow their children to spend ‘on screens’. This concern is often centred on whether lack of technology use may harm their future prospects.
This post originated a few years ago as an essay I wrote for one of my teachers at school, giving a young person’s perspective of the Steiner school policy to limit access to technology for children. A longer, more in-depth version can be found here
Based on my own experiences, and those of people who I know in a similar position, I can see no grounds for concern that limiting or removing access to technology for children, even up to their later teens, has any effect regarding requirements for technological literacy in adult life. The very fact that you are currently on a website for which I wrote much of the code is testament to that in itself. In addition, I would say that the majority of computer, phone and online activity (both in a school setting and at home) of children under the age of fourteen bears little or no resemblance to that in work environment.
That very neatly brings me on to my next point. One of the arguments that I often hear is that without access to a smartphone, and thereby to calls, texts, Whatsapp and Messenger, it is difficult to have any kind of social life in the modern world. Beyond that, there is also the assertion that it is not safe to be without these means of contact.
To address the first point, what seems to be forgotten is that the ability to speak to people is not in itself a social life. Especially since the lockdowns of the past couple of years, and all of the Zoom meetings and other general video calls that they entailed, there is a general assumption amongst a large part of the population that communicating digitally has the same inherent value as meeting in person. This is fundamentally untrue, especially for children, for whom in-person interaction plays not only an important social function but also an essential developmental role that technology simply cannot achieve. Do we not constantly hear about the necessity of sending children to nursery or kindergarten and then to school for this very reason? The value of modern communication is that it makes the process of arranging to meet up easy, not that it removes the need to do so. As such, it should be the role of parents to arrange meetings for their children, as they will be the ones to facilitate them happening. In my opinion the only reason for arguing anything else is laziness on the part of the parents in question.
On the subject of safety, my argument is simple. For hundreds of years children have managed without having a distress-signal-in-waiting in their pockets. Why should it be any different now? “Yes,” you might say, “but our world is much more dangerous than it was then.” This is a very common argument, but I have yet to find any evidence that it is true. Yes, our roads might be busier, but will having a phone make any difference to this fact?
One of the most difficult aspects of negotiating the path of how much technological access to allow children is the presence of peer pressure and what has come to be known as ‘fear of missing out’. All children experience these two forces in many aspects of their lives, and from my experience it is always a challenge to parents when they do, especially when it comes to technology. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I experienced both very strongly and would frequently express the fact to Mum, leading to her having to be quite strong to maintain the decision she had made. At the time, the fact that she did was very difficult for me, as it meant that I was not able to take part in discussions about the latest computer games, or Minecraft, when the subject came up amongst my friends and classmates. In hindsight, however, I am very grateful that things worked the way they did, as I definitely had a happier and more fulfilling childhood as a result.
As a general rule for the children who I know and have known, including when I myself was a child, I have noticed a strong correlation between easy access to technology and a reduced enthusiasm for and interest in the world around them. There could be any number of reasons for this, but to me it seems that the most likely is a combination of the easy sensory stimulation of a computer or phone being difficult to match in the real world, and the somewhat addictive nature of these technologies meaning that, even whilst engaged in other activities their minds are continually on what they will do on their device when they get home. These are also noticeable in adults, but for children, for whom every waking moment is a learning experience, this is much more detrimental.
You might come away from this article having been made to think. You might come away simply judging me to be a highly reactionary person who is bitter about others having more access to technology than I did myself. Whichever is the case, I do hope that you will consider your own use of technology, and what that of your children, present or future, should be.