I am writing this on a computer. I often research information on the internet. I do not ever want to suggest that we should reject Information Technology — the real question with all technology is its effective and appropriate use. Let’s consider then what is required in processing information. I have mentioned three filters essential as the basis for humanising data: morality, sensitivity, discernment.
These qualities are developed out of what we call, in Steiner education, willing, feeling, and thinking — the faculties of the soul. Then there are seven life processes — breathing, warming, nourishing, secreting, maintaining, growing, and generating — evident in our life/physical functions. Now, these processes are also active, as it were subliminally, in the assimilation and transformation of our experiences — that is, in learning.
Learning first requires a rhythmic balance between taking in and letting go, between attentiveness and reverie, remembering and forgetting, between waking and sleeping. This breathing must permeate the whole of our experience. Then we have to warm to what we receive, if we are to incorporate it — otherwise the facts will leave us cold. We also have to digest information, and finally secrete what may be useful and excrete the useless. These are four distinct though interpenetrating learning processes. The three further stages involve being able to make use of the assimilated material. We practice a newly acquired skill, use new information repeatedly, in order to keep it, or we will otherwise lose it; this is just in order to maintain the basic capacity. Developing or growing the skills is an extension of this into a further stage of facility. Then, there may be a truly creative stage where something new is generated, freshly born from what was first assimilated some time before.
So these are the seven stages in information processing. There are real consequences for human life if we do not cultivate the right functioning of the life processes. So too with the learning processes. Information pollution can shock and even sicken each of them. We sense disturbances to the life-processes as an inability to get a grip on things; we can surmise their basic health when we are readily able to take things on board. Now, Waldorf education is concerned with these processes — they are essential to the activity of learning, and must be nurtured and strengthened. This is a progressive task, which underlies all the determination of Steiner teachers to use particular methods in teaching, and to introduce both the content of the curriculum, and the many and various tools of technology, at the most appropriate times. They are convinced that all information processing must be established thoroughly in its basis first, before progressing to the most complex tools.
I recall a handcraft teacher, paraphrasing Rudolf Steiner, saying, ‘The child who can knit a few stitches together in Class 1 might be enabled to knit a few thoughts together at puberty’. I think it really is like that. It’s this metamorphosis of human capacities that is so interesting. A few years ago, one of my former pupils, now in her thirties and a remarkable adult educator, told a group of parents that it seemed that everything she did in the Steiner school was concerned with processing — methodically taking in and then letting go, enthusiastically engaged in assimilating each experience, rhythmically practising each new skill, and growing and developing all kinds of capacities. Then, she concluded, a person has the basis to do anything they want to. This would include any facility in using a computer, which she said she just did when she needed to, like everything else.
[to be continued]
