We are constantly informed that access to information is the issue in education. I think that this really is rubbish — such statements demonstrate the degree to which politicians and educationists alike have been captured by commercial interests. In the developed world, information is easily accessed, and the necessary skills are easily acquired. I believe the real issue is the screening and processing of information.
The greatest challenge related directly to access, and the basis for processing, is how to screen the enormous amount of information we are bombarded with daily. We suffer from information pollution. We can be dumbed-down by the content of much of it, but we are dulled-down by the sheer quantity of it, regardless of its quality. The cost is a loss of sensitivity in all our senses — we then may end up disconnected rather than connected. And I would suggest that real connectedness — the experience of being in the picture, the activity of belonging, of feeling present in our lives — is critical for effective living.
We need to develop screening techniques. We can first decide to eliminate or reduce some of the pollution entering our homes, and our schools. For instance, because little children really have no filters in their consciousness, I believe that they must be protected. That is why I recommend that they should have no access to those powerful opiates of the senses: television, videos, DVDs and computer games. It takes time to have the right filters properly installed — I mean those mental ones — which can effectively screen information.
During the first 6 - 7 years the child requires protection from any information which is not the direct experience of healthful living in their immediate environment. The body and its forces — and particularly the will that is embedded in the body — develops most strongly through the active yet relatively unconsciousness experience of what we have traditionally called goodness. So the appropriate ‘Information Technology’ (IT) programme in the home and kindergarten is real action — doing wholesome stuff and being in-formed by experience.
Genuine education in the primary school years is concerned with the careful development of all the senses. These are the true information gateways; we don’t want to have information super-highways or freeways built through them. The senses are developed healthily through the experience of what is beautiful in the world and in human life — the experience of purity of form, tone, quality expressed in harmony and proportion. In this period, artistic activity, concerned with the wholeness of imagination, is the basis for real ‘Information Technology’.
From around the age of 12, and throughout the high school years the faculties concerned with discerning the truth are cultivated. Here, in the education of these intellectual faculties, everything that is conventionally called Information Technology gradually becomes relevant. Students can now begin to effectively process information.
Morality, sensitivity, discernment — these are the fundamental filters that need to be installed to deal with information pollution. A filter must be such that it separates the good from the bad, the beautiful from the ugly, the truth from lies. We can readily see how each of these faculties can be subverted through a premature exposure to pollution. The human being is a slow developer — how slow, I have tried to suggest in this new take on old information.
