TV is embedded in our culture and taken for granted to such a degree that it is often difficult for us to question its value. Similarly, with the increasing prominence of cinema, the personal computer and video games and their adoption into everyday life, rarely is a dissenting voice heard. However it is widely held amongst those involved in Steiner education, as well as by researchers in the USA (see recommended reading), that watching TV and videos and playing computer games is detrimental to the healthy development of the child. Our reasons for this are:

• All children have an innate imaginative capacity and their natural state is to be active in this. This is one of the great gifts of childhood and crucial for their healthy journey into adulthood, when children acquire other faculties. As they do so, it is a capacity, which is usually lost or transformed, never to be re-lived in the same way. TV, videos and/or computer games etc, make children unhealthily "still" and stifle their own imaginations. By presenting the child with "finished" images, the child is required to do no inner work (or active play) at all and their imagination is "disabled" whilst watching. Afterwards, this can result in listlessness, lack of initiative and boredom; children may need to be constantly entertained. Alternatively, it may result in children being over-stimulated to such an extent that they can no longer listen properly to real people - they switch on or off as they please. It is felt that this kind of stimulation is in fact deprivation for the child's own abundant creative abilities.
• Through our education, we encourage children's natural capacity to be highly sensitive to their environment and the people around them. They are, therefore, deeply susceptible to being mesmerised; they cannot filter their absorption of the things they see and hear. We are careful in both the kindergarten and school to present material in a way appropriate to their age and sensibilities. By contrast, frequently, the quality of children's material on TV, videos and computers is very poor. They force images and noises of all kinds upon the child which are in our view inappropriate - the children may become desensitised as their threshold for violence, noise, aesthetics, moral and social behaviours - you name it - lowers. Young children do not have the discrimination to regulate their own watching. They are not yet able to know what is good for them and what is not and they depend on the adults around them to decide the boundaries, which will protect them (in all areas of life, not just this one) until they can freely take care of themselves.
• Furthermore, the images that flash past on the screen are not connected to real life - they are an artificial representation of life and, as such, abstract. One cannot relate to TV. By contrast, in a Steiner school, the teachers do not use textbooks - they seek to give stories and lesson content from memory so that the communication exchange is real and alive. Children live vividly in the present and to be healthy they need to feel deeply connected to the world around them. They do not have the intellectual sophistication to cope healthily with this abstract phenomenon. TV et al literally undo the work we do at our school. We would ideally like all TVs to be gathering dust under a cloth in the cupboard or to be thrown away completely. However, recognising that this is unlikely, we request that children attending St Paul's do not watch TV from Sunday to Thursday. They should definitely not watch TV in the mornings before coming to school. If your child is used to a heavy diet of television watching, don't despair! It may be easier than it sounds to change your family routine. Many of us have discovered that one-time TV addicts have found a wealth of positive things to do in the creative and supportive atmosphere of a Steiner school community.