Wealthy families working at Silicon Valley tech companies are shelling out vast sums of money to give their children the kind of education their grandparents might have endured—just without the corporal punishment. This week, it emerged that private institutions offering screen-free schooling are attracting growing interest from tech-industry parents worried about the effects of screen time on their children's development. In other words, the architects and biggest beneficiaries of the digital revolution are paying to protect their kids from its consequences.
Here's a modest proposal: any Silicon Valley executive hastening the technological transformation of society should have to send their own kids to a school that hands out iPads to 5-year-olds on day one. Of course it is; children shouldn't be punished for their parents’ sins. But if Silicon Valley really considers their technology too harmful for their own kids, why should everyone else’s have to suffer it?
Software engineer German Gil, whose tech career spans Netflix, Facebook and GitHub, told The Guardian earlier this week why he enrolled his daughter at San Francisco Waldorf—a private school that does not allow screens in the classroom. He said he wanted to create an experience in which his "kid could be a kid," ensuring her school days are entirely screen-free. Victoria now reportedly spends her days binding books by hand and attending classes outside, instead of tapping away on a screen or laptop.
The school says applications for early-childhood places, which cost the parents almost $40,000 a year in tuition fees, have risen notably, with many of the prospective parents employed in tech. A year of high school tuition at Waldorf comes in at nearly $60,000—more than the average American makes in a year. "People in Silicon Valley love to profit from selling technology to the world, but we don't necessarily want to buy it ourselves," said Aran Johnson, a teacher in Palo Alto interviewed by Newsweek last month.
San Francisco Waldorf should offer him a job in the marketing department. Funnily enough, technology brings all kinds of benefits to the education sector. Text-to-speech software and dyslexia-friendly fonts can transform the learning experience for children with dyslexia, while automatically generated subtitles can boost visual learning for deaf pupils.
Education apps help to structure and deliver proven learning pathways, while immersive learning and virtual reality simulations can bring the magic of science and math to life before a child’s eyes. None of these tools would exist without the kind of ware hard and soft developed in Silicon Valley and beyond. So why are the tech heads willing to pay a small fortune to shield their kids from their own creations?
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