Computers in Education, page 2

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Computers in Education / 2

    I have taught students from kindergarten to college level, and I served as a consultant for Waldorf and inner city public schools, and I have yet to see any "learning tool" that can replace a human teacher. Please remember, from K through 8, the Waldorf school doesn't only reject computers as learning tools - Waldorf teachers also do without textbooks, basal readers, ditto sheets, bulletin boards, motivational posters and Junior Scholastic magazine. There are times of day when we even turn off the incandescent lights and illumine the room with a candle: one couldn't go much further than that in doing without all the modern accouterments of "educational enhancement"!
    We have two basic reasons for this approach. Number one, as I noted before, is that we ascribe to a human-centered method of education. The teacher's living and warm presence, and the unfolding of content in the immediacy of the moment are what convey knowledge - and wisdom - most powerfully to the child. Anything that "mediates" between the child and teacher will, in some sense, dampen down this living quality. We need only recall the remarkable powers of memory retained by people who lived in an oral tradition and compare them to the weak memories of those of us who depend upon memos and Filofaxes - and computer PIMs - to recognize that something is lost when person-to-person pedagogy disappears. The fact that the teacher has worked to study sources, to distill them into a quintessence which is customized for her particular class and is ready to patiently present, and, if necessary, to repeat what she has presented - none of this is lost on the child, for whom the living teacher is a model of the "life-long learner."
    No matter how sophisticated the graphics and how "life-like" the synthesized voice presented on the CD-ROM, a very impersonal element creeps into the child's educational experience: a subtle sense arises that machines, rather than people, are the "good" teachers. If a living teacher is the child's role model for learning, the child will naturally strive to become more of a human being; if software and the ghostly images of people on TV screens are the role models, the child will (through her inherently imitative nature) slowly become ever more "machine-like," impersonal and "cool."

The tragic loss of human values and conscience among the young in America may be symptomatic of the malaise of a generation raised by, entertained by, and increasingly educated by the non-human, conscience-neutral and bloodless media. We need not be surprised by the report in Wired magazine that of "the ten most accessed links from the Whole Internet Catalog's GNN Select," seven are sexual in nature.

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