Why the Waldorf Media Guidelines?
Waldorf Schools are dedicated to nurturing each child’s capacity for creative imagination, independent thinking, and positive action. The school’s efforts to foster students’ healthy emotional development and meaningful relationships with their environment are undermined by those encounters with media that separate children from authentic experience and promote a distorted, developmentally inappropriate, and consumerist view of the world. Students best learn to use electronic media as a resource and tool when these media are introduced after children have developed a rich experiential foundation. Media thus become a supplement to, not a substitute for, the richness of direct experience.
Young children learn by doing, so it is not just the content of the media (educational programs, for example), but also the medium itself that hinders the formation of a strong will, a creative mind, and inner balance. Electronic media overstimulates the senses and the nervous system. They affect the inherent creativity of a child because of their fixed, artificial pictures with predetermined outcomes. Recent research, including that of the American Academy of Pediatrics, cites resulting learning and behavioral disorders sleep disturbances, and physiological damage. Studies also show that age-inappropriate media affects the immune system, encourages passivity, contributes to hyperactivity, ADD/ADHD, and may lead to addiction later in life.
Parents have consistently found that reducing the influence of media on their family life has encouraged family members to develop a livelier interest in one another, enlivened and deepened their communication, and fostered a deeper connection to the world around them. The school expects that each parent understands and supports the media guidelines for the good of their own children and their children’s peers. “Electronic Media” includes television, movies, computers, and all other video and audio devices, including cell phones, personal digital assistants, video games, and music/mp3 players.