Question: We are now in the age of computers and Internet. Should we introduce computers in a Montessori Children’s House when the child is around two years old? What sort of activities should be introduced? Children are still no in a position to handle the mouse. Should the activities revolve around storytelling and then gradually move on to other activities as they grow older?
In India children enjoy working with computers. I know of a three-year-old child who can even insert the CD on his own and work with it. Of course, such cases are rare. Do you think these types of activities are physically or mentally harmful?
Answer: Computers should not be introduced under any circumstances whatsoever in a Children’s House. Computers should not be introduced as a working tool in any classroom until the children are at least nine years of age, when their minds have acquired the maturity to use them as an extension rather than a substitute of their own abilities.
Introducing computers at an early age is particularly damaging to the developing child, both physically and mentally, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most serious harm occurs because the computer immobilizes the child. The child learns through movement and by taking in its environment by the use of its senses. To both movement and the use of the senses, the computer is a severe handicap.
A two-year-old who has been allowed to move freely and purposefully since he came into the world can certainly learn the use of the mouse, and is most assuredly capable of inserting a CD, but to what end? To call up dimensionless images that may or may not have any relation to its human experience?
Computers are marvelously ingenious tools with prodigious potential in the right place and at the right time. However, computers are truly harmful to the development of the mind, the body, and the very human spirit. They are also capable of warping and mutilating the emotional life of the growing individual.
We are a social species and need contact with other humans if we are to become human ourselves. We cannot socialize with phantoms, with electrons, with virtual realities. We are creatures of the earth, not the ether.
AMI Communications – 2001/4, page 38
