Why Waldorf Schools Ban Screens

Waldorf schools keep screens away from young children because, in anthroposophy's account of development, the child up to the change of teeth is wholly a sense organ, and what enters through the senses in those years is not received as information but built into the body. The forces that form the organs in the first seven years are the forces of the etheric body, the life body, and they work through imitation and through the child's own activity. A screen supplies finished pictures, moving of themselves, to a child whose task is to make pictures out of its own forces and to move its own limbs. The tradition does not oppose technology. It holds that there is an order to development, and that the faculties which later master a machine are built first in a body that has been allowed to grow without one.

The child as sense organ

In The Education of the Child, Steiner's essay of 1907, the child before the change of teeth is described as an organism entirely given over to the surrounding world, absorbing it and reproducing it in gesture, in speech, in play, and in the forming of its own organs. What the adults around the child do, the child imitates, down to the moral tone of a gesture. This is why the Waldorf kindergarten is furnished with real work, baking, sweeping, gardening, sawing, sewing, done by adults in the child's sight: the child builds its will and its body by copying activity that is whole and meaningful.

A screen presents activity that is not there. The figures move, but nothing in the room moves; the child's limbs are still, the eyes are held, and the imitative forces have nothing to lay hold of that the child could do. The tradition's word for this is that the etheric forces are drawn out of the limbs and up into the head before their time, and the body is built by a child sitting still.

Picture-forming is the etheric body's work

At the change of teeth, around seven, the etheric body is born free of the work of building the organs and becomes available for memory, for rhythm, and above all for the inner picture. This is the faculty the whole Waldorf curriculum from the first grade to puberty is built on. The teacher tells the story rather than reading it; the letters are drawn out of pictures; the history of Greece is lived in the imagination before it is dated. The child makes the picture, and the making is the exercise.

A finished picture supplied from outside relieves the child of exactly this activity. What is given ready-made does not need to be formed, and a faculty that is not used does not develop. The tradition's account is precise on this point: the screen does not fill the imagination, it replaces it, and it replaces it with images formed by someone else for a purpose that is not the child's growth. This is the same reason the Waldorf doll has a bare face and the kindergarten toys are simple: the less finished the object, the more the child does.

The senses that build the body

Anthroposophy counts twelve senses, and the four lower ones, the sense of touch, the sense of life, the sense of one's own movement, and the sense of balance, are the ones that develop in the first years through bodily activity: climbing, carrying, balancing, kneading, running. They are the ground on which the higher senses and, later, thinking rest. A screen engages sight and hearing in a flat, flickering field and leaves the four lower senses idle. The tradition's observation is that a child whose lower senses have not been exercised arrives at the grades with a restlessness that is not a fault of character but an unfinished body.

When screens enter

Rudolf Steiner died in 1925; there is no lecture on television and none on the telephone in the pocket. The media policy of a Waldorf school is not derived from a text but from the developmental picture, and it is set by each school, since no central body governs them. The common form, and the one the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America and the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship describe, is a screen-free early childhood and lower school, a gradual introduction of media as a subject of study in the middle grades, and computers in the high school, where the student's own judgment has been born at puberty and can meet the machine as its master. Many schools ask families to keep the same order at home through the early years, because a kindergarten day of imitation and free play is undone by an evening of screens.

What the tradition does not claim

It does not claim that screens are harmful to adults, or that the technology is evil, or that a child who has seen a film is damaged. It holds that development has phases, that each phase has its own work, and that the young child's work is done with the limbs and the imagination. The aim is the free adult, and the tradition's finding is that freedom in front of a machine belongs to someone who was first allowed to build a body and an inner life without it.