Some prospective parents are puzzled by the lack of technology in Lower School classrooms, which is bucking the trend in UK education.
Here is the transcript of a neuroscientist and former teacher talking about “what went wrong in schools”:
“Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive functioning to even general IQ, even though they go to more school than we did. So why? What happened? What happened around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development? The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning.
“Across 80 countries... if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly to the point where kids who use computers about 5 hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over two-thirds of a standard deviation less than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school. And that's across 80 countries."
“Why Gen Z has a lower IQ than previous generations” Dr Jared Cooney Horvarth MD
“Let's go to the U.S. We have our NAEP. That's our big data. Take any state NAEP data, compare that to when that state adopted one-to-one technology widely, and watch what happens. The NAEP data will plateau and then start to drop. Luckily, we have academic research stretching back to 1962 that shows the exact same story for 60 years. When tech enters education, learning goes down.
“Now, that's research, but now we need mechanisms. Luckily, over the last about two decades, we've been doing a lot of work in what we call the science of learning. How do human beings learn? And we now have the clear understanding of why tech does not work for learning. And it is all biological. It's not that the tech isn't being used well enough; we haven't been trained enough; we need better programs.
It's we have evolved biologically to learn from other human beings, not from screens. And screens circumvent that process."
Caption: Nobel Laureate in the Sciences, and Waldorf graduate, Thomas C. Südhof, is patron of a suite of innovative qualifications that develop eleven highly prized creative thinking skills through an educational approach that bridges the gap between structured, official learning (formal) and natural, experiential, interest-driven learning (informal and non-formal). The portfolio-based Certificate at ESS is equivalent to three GCSEs.
Public debate is growing around screen time for children, with more and more headlines announcing a school in Edinburgh has relandscaped break and lunch times into retro, analogue environments. Steiner Waldorf schools stand out for offering something rarer still: a fully screen-free primary education in the classroom, for homework, at playtime and on school trips.
As an outlier in our approach to the use of technology within the curriculum, guided by the same philosophy that steers the entire curriculum: The Right Thing At The Right Time, Waldorf schools carefully consider the classroom and campus for children so that wonder, imagination and creativity thrive. Technological literacy – a crucial 21st Century skill – can be mastered quickly when children reach adolescence and have the developmental maturity to know how, why, and when to use tech as a tool. Yet it is incompatible in the younger years with the holistic education we are striving to deliver.
This distinctive approach requires strong parental alignment; which can feel out-of-step in highly tech-driven systems. We accept this trade-off purposely, nurturing warm technology through hands-on, experiential learning and direct interaction. There is an established culture whereby pupils, parents, pastoral teachers and the public alike put their phones away whilst on campus, thus modelling a healthy detachment from our tech; and pupils aged 11-13yo pop their devices into a lockable cabinet they've nicknamed the 'phone prison' for up to seven hours of the school day with the aim to reset expectations around human connection across the school. Younger pupils leave them at home, if they have one at all. The highest percentage of pupils in Scotland are protected by a Parent Pact delaying a smartphone until 14 and social media until 16.
"The Edinburgh Steiner School is a community of parents who don't want our children on screens for hours and hours a day from the age of nine, and that's possible here," shares parent, William Sutcliffe, in the ESS short film Community. "You need a community to do that. You can't do that on your own as a parent...and it turns the campus of the school into such a lovely place, such a happy place, such a warm place."
“Think back to your childhood, to your schooling..." continues Dr Jared Cooney Horvarth MD. "I guarantee all of us at one point took a test on reading comprehension. And the way it looked is this: Here's a passage of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12 questions about that passage. Most of them are inferential, not factual. They're asking you to go beyond what you just read to see what you understood.
“Last year, the SATs [US standard tests] had a reading comprehension section. Here's what it looked like: Here is a single sentence of 75 words. Here is one question fact-based about that sentence. Next. Here is another sentence of 75 words. Here is one question about that sentence. Next. Last year, they redefined reading comprehension to mean 54 short sentences with one question about each. That is skimming. That's not reading. Why would we ever do that? Because what do kids do on computers? They skim. But rather than determining what do we want our children to do and gearing education towards that, we are redefining education to better suit the tool. That's not progress. That is surrender.”
