Sir, The launch by the Taoiseach of the IT 2000 initiative promising computers in every school. prompts me to sound a word of warning before we are all stampeded into accepting the glitter of technological "goodies" in our primary schools, in place of the real content that will provide our children with the inner strength to use technology at a later stage in service of their creative powers.
Technology, with its immense potential, should serve our culture and not control and direct it. In educational terms, this means that the full range of human capacities needs to be valued and developed in our schools with greater attention, not less, paid to the arts and to those aspects of a broad curriculum that will help the healthy development of the human personality.
The social and emotional development of young children is dependent on their human relationships, and time spent with computers, however entertaining and superficially attractive, is time lost to real learning. It is attractive also for the adult world to accept the dangerous fiction that information is education and to pass the responsibility for the education of our children to the culture of technology. Immensely powerful economic and political forces are at work here to persuade us that technology in education, even of the youngest children, is absolutely necessary for our prosperity.
The opposite is true. Computers in primary school classrooms will further impoverish our children in the immediate experience of the world and in the qualitative wealth of human relationships that forms the foundation of a personal moral engagement with that world at a later stage.
Pupils at second level will master the use of computers quickly and easily and will do so with the inner resources necessary to be creative with technology, to the extent that their primary education has been relationship centred and rich in "human software". So let's not buy it from the peddlers of cold technology. Our culture is cold enough as it is. - Yours, etc.,
Cooleenbridge Steiner School, Raheen Road,
Tuamgraney, Co Clare