A recent story in the NY Times reveals that parents working at some of the best known Silicon Valley tech companies are sending their kids to a computer-free Waldorf elementary school in Los Altos, Calif.
Engineers and execs from Apple, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo are supporting this little nine-classroom utopia where tuition starts at $17,750 and where you won’t find a single computer or screen of any sort. Also, kids are discouraged from watching television or logging on at home.
Alan Eagle, who works in executive communications at Google and has a degree in computer science from Dartmouth, has a fifth grader who attends the school and he told the Times that she “doesn’t know how to use Google.”
The thinking is that technology interferes with creativity and young minds learn best through movement, hands-on tasks, and human-to-human interaction. Students at this school are gaining math, patterning, and problem-solving skills by knitting socks. They aren’t exposed to fractions through a computer program. Instead they learn about halves and quarters by cutting up food. Sounds a bit like summer camp? Well, yes, but parents in Los Altos and at over 150 similar schools across the country say the Waldorf method works and they’re sending their kids to top colleges, from Oberlin to Berkeley.
http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2011/10/24/tech-execs-send-kids-to-anti-computer-school/