LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his
children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon
Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens
and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be
found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and
the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with
computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But
the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech
economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and
schools don’t mix.
This is the
Waldorf School of the Peninsula,
one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a
teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through
creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers
inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention
spans.
The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an
intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.
“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar
school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196
children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at
the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an
iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science
degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google,
where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses
an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader,
“doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning.
(Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of
gadgets.)
Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech
connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction.
Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and
made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them
until they were 17.”
While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the
Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with
colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with
workbooks and No. 2 pencils.
On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates
refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around
balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says
helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination.
The long-term goal: make socks.
Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by
asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She
asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they
shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A
roomful of human calculators.
In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills
by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing
catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and
brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or
verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the
divine.
Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries
to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she
taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples,
quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.
“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I
made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I
had their attention?”
Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with
computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this
leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.
Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf
advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools
they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they
would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not
score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a
standardized math and reading curriculum.
When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the
Association of Waldorf Schools
of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that
94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the
United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading
to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.
Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are
students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a
selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And
it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional
methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los
Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive
training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission
that can be lacking in other schools.
Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental
choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement.
Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold
students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned
on electronic devices will not tune in without them.
Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the
National School Boards Association,
which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were
essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but
are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn
said.
Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at
Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational
methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the
classroom will always benefit learning.”
“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction
when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”
And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.
“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the
contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a
high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has
three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that
his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.
And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children
need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents
counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?
“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said.
“At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy
to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when
they get older.”
There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San
Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley,
which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its
principles.
California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate
share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy
Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high
school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power
Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.
The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the
Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade
and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance
was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of
elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and
highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a
knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about
technology they have ample access and expertise at home.
The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have
they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade
classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father
works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he
is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.
The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and
relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar,
11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting
around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying
attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I
said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”
Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning
with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could
monitor his progress over the years.
“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first
grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the
same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can
still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”
is to serve humanity by supporting the moral and spiritual development of people of all cultures, by helping them to remember who they really are and to live by their highest values.
