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Coming to Our Senses

The Media and Their Message

    One of the most readily accepted truisms concerning computers is that they, along with other electronic media, are "a set of tools to enhance the imagination and provide new methods for expression and learning." It is often surprising to parents visiting Waldorf schools that Waldorf practitioners are not more open to "properly applying these tools to daily living." I should mention at the outset that I am the proud owner of a Pentium desktop PC with multimedia capabilities and a modem, as well as a notebook computer, and work quite happily with a variety of Windows-compatible software. I have worked as a film editor and written film criticism, and I listen to the radio and now and then watch TV (my older son has cable). Along with many other colleagues in the Waldorf movement, I have no objection to adults immersing themselves in the world of technological wonders.
    I remember well that in the early 1950s when I entered grade school, the "visual aids" approach which utilized a film strip projector was going to revolutionize our educational experience. Sometime after that, "Sunrise Semester" debuted on television, as a first step in the "video revolution" that was going to transform education in America. Several years later, I was part of one of the first Advanced Placement Physics classes in the nation, and our education was going to be revolutionized through the utilization of videotaped lectures by great physicists broadcast over closed circuit television. I have already lived through several of these "electronic revolutions" and I've yet to see anything happening in mainstream American education except for a steady decline in quality and morale among students and teachers.

    I have no idea where all of the old slide projectors went when they were replaced by closed circuit televisions, or where the televisions went when they were replaced by computers, or where the old 386 PCs will go when they are replaced by multimedia Pentium models, etc. - but a lot of corporate marketing departments are undoubtedly very happy about the brisk sales that every new "revolution" brings about. I don't think that I'm alone in these concerns. In a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, Todd Oppenheimer recounts

that :

    In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that "the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and ... in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." Twenty-three years later, in 1945, William Levenson, the director of the Cleveland public schools' radio station, claimed that "the time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard." Forty years after that the noted psychologist B. F. Skinner, referring to the first days of his "teaching machines," in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote, "I was soon saying that, with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom." Ten years after Skinner's recollections were published, President Bill Clinton campaigned for "a bridge to the twenty-first century ... where computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards."

    The substance of these prophetic statements might have been best summed up by H. L. Mencken in 1918:

    ...there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.

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