The Future Does Not Compute

Education Without Computers

This is Appendix C of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, by Stephen L. Talbott. Copyright 1995 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter in its entirety for noncommercial purposes. For information about the author's online newsletter, NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, see http://www.netfuture.org/.

The abyss separating child from adult is strange and baffling. Who among us can look at a classroom of children and tell which one will grow into his full powers, and which one will -- say, at age twenty or thirty or fifty -- begin to shrink from life and growth, allowing his capacities to shrivel? We hear often about the “unpromising” childhood of an Einstein or a Churchill, but not so often about the many exceptional promises of youth that never quite come to flower. Both are enigmas the educator must decipher. How can he pretend to teach, if he averts his eyes from the ruling mysteries of childhood?

If education is a matter of cultivating capacities rather than shoveling into the child a quantity of testable knowledge, then our difficulty in recognizing how those capacities -- future potentials -- are developing suggests that we don't know a whole lot about what we're doing. Perhaps this humbling awareness is the first requirement for a good teacher.

Three characteristics of Waldorf education have particularly drawn me to it: (1) precisely the sense of humility ...