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by Sally Jenkinson

In her book Children's Minds, Margaret Donaldson includes a memorable extract from Cider With Rosie in which a young and somewhat disgruntled Laurie Lee tells his family about his first day at school. 'You just sit there for the present' he had apparently been told. He complains bitterly that though he sat and waited all day long, the anticipated present completely failed to materialise. 'I never got it. I ain't going back there again,' he says.

This little vignette exposes the child's misunderstanding, his 'ambiguity where we would see none' (Donaldson p 17) and his subsequent disappointment with the experience of school, which to his young mind promised much but failed to deliver.

The charge that school had never given him the present has another layer of meaning. Across the span of life, it is as children that we are most 'present'. Engrossed in the moment and lacking discrimination and the filter of cynicism, young children are healthily interested in everything: the distant stars vying equally for their attention with the enchanting, dirt-filled cracks of the pavement at their feet.

Yet despite their energetic determination to learn and explore at their own pace, children have always been drawn out of the fascinating and absorbing world of the present to attend to adult demands and needs, or to be trained (as opposed to educated) to serve future-oriented goals.

In fact, the practice of hurrying children out of childhood has a long and shameful past. Adults have always expected even very young children to work for them. In the 1900's one quarter of all London's children aged 5-13 were working in paid jobs outside school. Compulsory education had been introduced with the aim of removing children from the exploitative child labour market to the work of the schoolroom. 'Children were now required to do school work as opposed to waged labour [and] for the majority, [it was] school work devised to produce an obedient and unquestioning labour force for the new factories and offices.' (Humphries, Mack, Perks 1998 p.27) Education was often brutal and authoritarian: exploitation dressed in the more acceptable guise of reform.

In contrast, guided by the principle of education towards freedom, the first 'Steiner' school was founded in 1919. Following a series of inspiring lectures given by Rudolf Steiner, the workers at the Waldorf cigarette factory in Stuttgart asked him for a school for their children. Steiner's aim was to create an education that would value and respect each person's right to their own thoughts, feelings and actions, whatever their background or circumstances, which would attend to the child's needs before those of the nation. Children would not be hurried out of childhood to serve extrinsic future needs. It was the child's present needs which would take precedence.

Some twenty years after Rudolf Steiner's death the Nazis closed down this school and six sister schools. They argued that Germany had no room for two kinds of education one that educated citizens for the state and another that taught children to think for themselves. (Oppenheimer Atlantic Monthly 1999)

Rudolf Steiner's deepest wish was to equip young people with the kind of qualities: clarity of thought, sensitivity of feeling, and purposeful will needed to generate a new social order and a new sense of ethics. Qualities that amongst other things would generate alternatives to war as a means of resolving conflict.

He said: 'We should not ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? Instead we should ask: what lives in every human being and what can be developed in him or her? Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. Society will then become what young people as whole human beings make out of the existing social conditions. The new generation should not just be made to be what present society wants it to become!' (Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship leaflet 1999)

This is the abiding motif behind the Steiner-teacher's approach to the child: what lives in you now and what will develop in you over time? Implicit in this attitude is a willingness to notice, and work with what presents itself (a present again) in the individual at different stages; a freedom from external imposition and a profound respect for the unfolding processes of time. Living today fully sets the arrow of the future on its true course.

The Unhurried Journey and the Morality of Time

Today's children, like Laurie Lee, are not being given the present in many other ways. A survey carried out in the United States found that the most common phrase addressed to children in the morning was 'Hurry Up!' A revealing and salutary commentary on adult attitudes to children and childhood and to the very different time frames within which children and adults operate.

Jay Griffiths, author of 'The Morality of Time', argues that all ideas about time have a moral component. Our society, he claims, is hooked on speed and has made the pleasure of encounter, the joy of the long lingering moment and the wisdom of reflection subservient to the virtue of speed. Formerly, societies looked backwards for the wisdom of their ancestors, or forwards with a duty of care towards their descendants. Today, he claims, we are 'Disrespectful of the past and careless of humanity's future.'

Ultimately, the fate of the earth itself lies in our ability to understand time: to grasp the critical relationship between exploitation and regeneration. Greed and speed equal depletion of energy. Technological time has usurped natural time and made slaves of us all.

In real time, writes Griffiths, 'Children live with Alice in a slowed up Wonderland, and they, like Alice, find the fussing, hurrying, speeding, watch-ridden white Rabbit very very silly indeed. I have met the White Rabbit... He is a dealer in foreign exchange... hyperalert, [he] speaks terribly quickly, his eyes are bloodshot and darting all over the place, his breath is jerky. He says he is addicted to adrenaline and works in hypermode and admits if you don't enjoy the rushes, you can't do the job. He is a man in love with speed. He describes his faults as speed-related; being easily frustrated by people, short-tempered and intolerant. His personal calls last, on average, five seconds. I asked him if his friends were intimidated at the speed he was going at? Maybe, he said, yes, but half the time I don't notice. I'm going too fast.' (Griffiths 1999 p.3)

The intensity of our fast-forward focus on the future and on acquisition and competition affects our attitudes to the most vulnerable group in our society. Our children are responding with a range of 'time-deprivation behaviours'. Their voices are speaking to us if only we can take the time to listen. An interesting new phenomenon recently highlighted in the press illustrates this point. In certain households as soon as the children get home from school they put on their pyjamas, and on Saturdays they wear them for as long as possible all day if they can. This strategy prevents their parents from taking them out to yet another 'don't be ungrateful it's for your own good' maths, piano, ballet, gym, tennis lesson. The children's behaviour makes it clear that all they want to do is to simply mess around, be themselves for a while, and live in their own time; hence the 'pyjama defence.' Every evening and weekend hoards of small and weary trophy hunters are ferried about in cars to bring back the spoils for their eager parents. We parents are victims too. In the grip of the speed neurosis ourselves, we have forgotten to notice that our children excel in being, as Eric Fromm perceptively observed in his book 'To Have or to Be' (Fromm 1997). The 'needing to have' state leads to dissatisfaction with the 'what is.'

Libby Purves expresses concern about the human cost incurred in this drive for acceleration, observing that,

...given sand, water, and a bucket an infant will unaidedly do physics, maths, resistant materials technology, design, hydraulics and (if burbling) language. A child burying an offending teddy head-first in the sand is doing ethics and drama; up-ending a bucket of water on his head is a fine training in comedy which may lead to a Bafta.
What is served by interfering with this personal curriculum because it is time to chant ABC or colour in tedious worksheets? Adult convenience is served, certainly: and parental neurosis about education, and government statistics fed by measurable results. But you've wrecked the game and impoverished the child. (Purves 15/06/99 Times)

Inevitably, this insidious and unnecessary impoverishment poverty of the imagination and poverty of choice has the most severe impact upon those children already short-changed by their life circumstances.

Convenience Childhood?

Evidence from the USA suggests that powerful psychotropic drugs are routinely administered to children as young as two without diagnosis and in the absence of medical symptoms in order to control their behaviour. Placed in inappropriately formal day care nurseries, to fit in with the long hours of adult work schedules, two-year-olds are dosed with modifying drugs to 'treat' their quite normal, but inconvenient, age-appropriate behaviours. Under pressure to conform to standards of behaviour previously expected from school children they are medicated and sedated.

Powerful drugs are also prescribed for ADHD-diagnosed children who show a disturbed relationship to time. In this painfully speeded-up world of ours, time intensive help based on emotional contact, commitment, patience, love and trust, is being superseded by the quick chemical fix which desensitises the child and effectively masks the symptoms of his/her individual problem/ need. Children are regulated and controlled by chemical time dispensing with the need for time-consuming interventions and therapy.

In the UK one in 5 children, between the ages of 4 and 20, show signs of stress another symptom of time disorder. Pressures to 'keep up' begin almost at birth. The human race is aptly named. (Bright Futures: The Big Picture, interim report published by the Mental Health Foundation 1999)

Speed obviously has advantages. Mowing the lawn with my Flymo takes less than half the time than if I had used the back-breakingly heavy mower my mother once pushed, and it leaves me with more energy for other things, But, and this is a big but, need we use speed so indiscriminately? Why should speed be an advantage when applied to education, for example? When given the opportunity, young children, along with poets, artists and scientists, live in slowed-up time: they notice things. They spend hours looking into the vast and tiny gallery of world exhibits newly displayed each day. In child time, slowed-up time, (even as an adult), one may see the world afresh, with heightened senses. This is the true gift of the present. Why rush to the future?

The Bright Future Report concludes with these words:

A truly child-nurturing society would be one where children were fully integrated rather than separated and where their needs were understood and were regarded as at least of equal importance as those of adults We seem to have lost sight of what it feels like to be a child and of the connection between the child and the adult self.

In out of school hours fear of the outdoor environment as a safe place to play has meant a move from freely chosen, involved, social, activities to static, asocial, sensory-deficient passive TV watching. First-hand experience is passed-over in favour of second hand entertainment - benefiting TV companies and commercial markets but once again 'impoverishing the child.'

Children have become increasingly alienated from real life and from each other. Diverted from their own tasks by the advert-laden, consumerist values of commercialism, the silent, passive watchers grow distant. Life is on pause for them. Chemical time and technological time replace child-time, human time.

When adults watch TV, according to Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, they refer to 'a vast backlog of real life experiences.' 'As the adult watches television, she argues, 'his own present and past relationships, experiences, dreams, and fantasies come into play, transforming the material he sees, whatever its origins or purpose, into something reflecting his own particular needs.' Children, she explains, do not have this background of real life experience and for many of them, TV watching constitutes a primary activity. Programmes are referenced by other programmes rather than by real life experiences. 'Children's early television experiences, she believes will, to some extent, '...serve to dehumanize, to mechanize, to make less real the realities and relationships they encounter in life. For them, real events will always carry subtle echoes of the television world.' (Winn p.10, 11)

In the USA pre-schoolers are the single largest TV audience, watching some 54 hours per week. These, and other similarly alarming statistics, prompted a group of Americans to launch a 'National Turn off TV week'. A list of 100 things to do instead of watching television was made available to anyone calling a given number. The response was amazing: the lines were jammed for days. The list included suggestions such as: 'Watch a sunset together' or 'Bake some cookies' simple communal pleasures, rooted in real time. It wasn't only the children who benefited from this campaign, as the many expressions of thanks from adults who had rediscovered forgotten pleasures demonstrated.

Children suffer physically from the long-term consequences of TV-induced immobility. When not watching, they are naturally fidgety, admirably inquisitive and irrepressibly active unless physical circumstances determine otherwise. Even in moments of deep concentration and apparent stillness, it is the active involvement in the chosen task which keeps the child engaged. In optimum conditions, being made to sit still is a form of torment, as those who use it as a means of control and punishment unfortunately know too well. TV watching achieves total control effortlessly, which is why it is such an efficient child-minder. Only illness, sleep and a depressed sense of well-being induce comparable periods of prolonged stillness. A diminution of consciousness is the common factor in all these states of being. (TV watching produces similar brain-waves to those observed in sleep).

Extensive watching effectively freezes the wonderfully imaginative movement tutorial, which playful children design for themselves at all stages of their development. Through movement, new skills are gained as increasing motor control gradually brings co-ordination and bodily grace. A good day's play makes a child feel healthy, physically at rest and at home in his body. Conversely, after heavy TV watching, a compensatory period of disordered, hyperactive movement usually occurs. Many of today's children go to bed with over-stimulated nervous systems and under-exercised bodies, resulting in disturbed sleep patterns which, in a horribly circular way, are then controlled by drugs.

Dr. Peter Struck, expressing concern about the physical effects of 'parking' children in front of the TV, writes:

...children who have too seldom run and jumped, who have had insufficient opportunity to play on a swing or in the mud, to climb and to balance, will have difficulty walking backwards. They lag behind in arithmetic and appear to be clumsy and stiff. These children cannot accurately judge strength, speed, or distance; and thus they are more accident prone than other children. [In Germany] ...two thirds of all school children listen to music droning from gigantic boom boxes, Walkmen and Diskmen. Among elementary school age children, one in three already possesses his or her own television and one in five his or her own computer.
...one in ten adolescents already suffers hearing loss; 60% of children entering school have poor posture, 35% are overweight, 40% have poor circulation. 38% cannot adequately co-ordinate their arms and legs, and more than 50% lack stamina for running, jumping and swimming.
(Struck 1999 p. 31)

Advertising agencies are openly engaged in a full-scale assault upon childhood. Through impossibly attractive images they appeal to children's vulnerabilities and those of their parents. Relying on 'pester power', children are exploited into persuading or haranguing their parents to make purchases. The crying child in the supermarket who wants what he has seen on TV is a sadly familiar figure. Shopping trips become a nightmare for parents.

The delightfully idiosyncratic and unpredictable fads of childhood are now deliberately stage-managed for profit. Every new film or computer generates profitable product lines the 'must-have' toys.

The strategic campaign to advertise and sell PokÄmon cards is a case in point. After high TV profiling, certain cards were deliberately limited to increase desirability and rarity value. This led to bullying and acts of desperation amongst children. A seven-year old offered to swap his first newly pulled baby tooth, presumably because of its under-the-pillow value; his gap-less friends refused it, sensing credibility problems at home perhaps. But what else had he to offer? Another boy went so far as to offer his sister in exchange for the desired card... Why do we reduce children to this helpless and humiliating state? Enhanced or reduced status and self-esteem are measured by possession, or the lack of, the right products: market forces rule the playground. Manipulative advertisers understand this painful social dynamic and employ it in a abuse of power. Our children, who rightly own nothing and thus everything, are cynically reduced and degraded by their own exploited feelings.

Away from the compulsions and obsessions engendered by the TV, video and computer, children are busy learning to belong, and to value others in ways which don't require acquisition or ownership. In the opinion of Vivian Gussin Paley, author of the inspiringly titled book, The Kindness of Children, they learn in ways which build a social and ethical world.

If the need to know how someone else feels is the rock upon which the moral universe depends, then the ancient sages were right. For this is surely what happens when children give each other roles to play in their continual inquiry into the nature of human connections. It is as schoolchildren that we begin life's investigations of those weighty matters.
(Paley, 1999, p.61)

Paley quotes a colleague: 'And what do the children philosophise about? How to gain access to every person, feeling, thing and event.' (Paley, 1999, p.67). Children want to understand life, to feel the fabric of society and to access their culture. They want to work out what makes people and things tick. Their way of doing this is through play.

I witnessed and became involved in cultural access play in a shopping game, which some children were playing in a kindergarten in York. Both real and pretend shopping requires specific cultural knowledge and playing shops authentically involves many skills. When I asked if I could buy something, I was told irritably that I would need money of course. Of course, but where was money exactly? Money was in the bank, 'over there', said the harassed shop assistant gesturing with a sweep of her arm, towards some shelves behind me. Returning, I offered my conkers, which I had (wrongly) assumed to be money. 'That's not money', she said with disdain, 'shells are, of course.' Of course. After another trip to the bank and now finally equipped with the right currency some small shells and a large flat one, I returned for another try. 'I'd like some potatoes please,' I said. Grudgingly, my potatoes (these were conkers) were put into a little bag. Then came a surprise. The bag was held at waist level, and then moved across the worksurface with slow deliberation. As it was held and moved in this formalised way, a perfectly synchronised 'beep' accompanied the mid-point of the transaction. My purchase had been scanned! I had hardly registered my amazement when I was asked to hand over my credit card: the flat shell. This was expertly swiped through an invisible machine and I was asked, with the hint of a friendly smile, to sign the payment slip.

The game continued as I moved on and I noticed the queue growing. I was inspired by the girl's mastery of the situation. The level of knowledge based on her own, free observations and intuitions, which she was able to bring to her play-creation, was remarkable. She was, scripting, acting, directing and performing the play as it was happening. The serious business of modern shopping had been faithfully re-created down to the smallest detail. Those small eyes and ears waiting at the check-out counter in the real shop had missed nothing. Here were children finding ways to access their culture and to master it. By using representation and imagination, they were living into the rules and rituals of purchase without needing to buy a thing. They were finding out how others might feel and think and act. Though they owned nothing at the end of the game, their richness of understanding and ability to act in the world had increased dramatically. So had mine. The contrast between the emotionally intense PokÄmon 'games' and the symbolic shopping experience could not be greater.

The need for a play-based curriculum to offset over-exposure to the artificial time frames imposed by TV, computers, behaviour modifiers and accelerated learning programmes has never been greater. Children deserve a curriculum which allows them time to develop empathy, to form relationships; to watch how things are done, to join in, to imitate, to wonder about things, to learn how to belong and to be allowed to be a child without fear of ridicule or shame.

In a slowed-up wonderland free from the world of white rabbit scheduling, children might be given over once more to wondering at and about the world. Must we set the clock to tick through childhood at such a rapid pace? Do we dare to value 'horizontal enrichment' over 'vertical acceleration?' (Elkind 1997, p122)

Written in the language of an earlier time which may seem sentimental to a modern reader, George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss, gives a sweet yet powerful description of a 'horizontally enriched' childhood.

Life did change for Tom and Maggie and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in itWhat novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.
(Eliot 1985, p94)

The threads of our childhood perceptions filter upwards and become integrated into our personalities. Our futures are built on our present perceptions, and the quality of our early encounters with the world, have the greatest, and most lasting influence over us. Deep knowledge, deep concentration, deep play bring deep satisfaction and contentment with life.

Can we imagine ourselves back into that place of discovery when the world was new, to that time when we were thrilled by our senses? Are we able to recapture the intense curiosity we had about the fascinating world we found ourselves in, and can we empathise with those in that state of being now?

Horizontal enrichment - sensory education

In the Waldorf Kindergarten, attention to the senses is an important part of 'horizontal enrichment.' Rudolf Steiner suggested that in addition to the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), there were seven others. These included: the sense of life (of one's own well-being), of movement, balance, warmth, the sense for sound, the sense for speech, the sense for the perception of the thoughts of others and the sense for grasping the ego of the other. The combined working together of all our senses gives us the ability to make informed judgements and to establish a rounded view on life, he said.

Current studies show that children, 'who do not have enough tactile experience have difficulty becoming accustomed to social and emotional intimacy. The senses used in physical intimacy (touch, muscular co-ordination and sense of balance) are weakened through the lack of sufficient stimulation.' (Struck p.31) Holding on to a picture of the sensory landscape can be a helpful framework for parents and other educators to work with. Have each of the child's senses been enlivened and thus educated by experience? Have I provided enough opportunities for sensory encounters to happen?

Through healthy use of their senses, children first practise dialectics in the oppositions between things: hot, cold, dry, wet (notes from Glöckler, Dornach 1999). They learn subtlety and gradation and begin to build a personal feeling life: a sensory memory. They also enjoy themselves! A richly orchestrated sense life through feeling becomes the basis of a complex differentiated life of thought and the life of the fingers prepares the life of the mind!

There's no time like the present

In the Steiner kindergarten, time is slowed-up but not down. There is continuity, safety and security. Adults have time to be focused on the now. Time to be available for the child: to meet her needs when they arise. There is time to make something: a wooden spoon, a new doll or a carved boat, perhaps. Creative processes, which the children can follow, from start to finish, require a substantial time-commitment and a degree of skill from the adult. Careful, transparent, accessible adult work imparts important 'concepts in action' to the watching child who learns about perseverance, flexibility, error, and the morality of time. Seeing the application of the adult will (intention, deliberation, perseverance, transformation), acts as a model of action for the child's will and the 'happening now' element is a magical tutorial.

Free from the dominance of machines, which are self-sufficient, asocial and set to run at a faster pace than our human one, children are invited but not compelled to join in with the daily activities. They are involved and their contributions are valued. The joy of doing things together, cooking or gardening, for example, awakens the desire to do things for others. The individual will easily makes the transition towards becoming a social will.

Slowed-up activities, (such as baking, ironing, washing, cleaning, with their attendant sensory smells, tastes, and textures), form the backdrop to the child's everyday experience. Each one of these processes needs to be slowed up in order to be thorough. Yeast rises in its own time and obeys its own laws. Patience is both a virtue and a necessity where organic processes are concerned. Processes such as these have the effect of rooting children and adults in real time. The patience and delayed gratification involved in bread-making is simply character-building it absolutely won't be hurried! Celebrating Seasonal Festivals links the child with Natural time and the course of the year. This helps develop healthy respect for the environment, urban and rural, and a feeling for stewardship of the earth.

Natural artefacts: conkers, shells, coloured cloths, pine cones etc., provide wings for the child's own imagination to fly-creating an antidote to the borrowed images churned out daily on the box, powerful images which quickly paralyse the individual imagination.

Given time, we know that quite ordinary sensory experiences, even those that are unpleasant, can begin to act as gateways to a rich imaginative life. As a child, R. L. Stevenson was inspired by the contents of his humble breakfast bowl.

When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk and explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here there was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his populations lived in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in Rosen 1994, p.97)

Fortunately for us, this little boy was not made to 'hurry up.' Though somewhat cavalier about his food, he was given time to live into his present, and here is the mystery again: fully attending the present also serves the future. The first stirrings of the poet and author of the future were present in the wonderful mix of milk, oats, and imagination at his morning breakfast table.

For today's youngsters, the lack of natural rhythm, the presence of so much high-speed activity in computer games, television, videos, etc., leads to over stimulation, dissatisfaction with the present and a disjunction with real time. Medication and certain foods also disturb the child's relationship to time and to the speed at which life is experienced. Children everywhere across the whole social spectrum lack the stabilising influence of healthy habits and daily rhythms. They lack the security that comes from repetition and sameness, the opportunity to experience joy in simple shared tasks and the freedom from the compulsion to perform/conform.

Our children are the future. They need time to create their own visions, to dream their own dreams, and in the fullness of time to act upon them. The least - perhaps the best - we can give them is the gift of the present.

Paper first presented at Parent Child 2000 Conference 12/04/2000, Business Design Centre London

Sally Jenkinson works with the Alliance for Childhood, and is an Early Years Consultant with the UK Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship. She was a Kindergarten teacher for many years.

Contact:
Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship, Kidbrooke Park,
Forest Row, East Sussex, RH18 5JA
E-mail: sallyjenkinson(at)lineone.net

Television Statistics

According to the A. C. Nielson Co. (1998), the average American watches 3 hours and 46 minutes of TV each day (more than 52 days of nonstop TV-watching per year). By the age of 65 the average American will have spent nearly 9 years glued to the tube.

I. Family Life

1 Percentage of US households with at least one television: 98

2 Percentage of US households with at least one VCR: 84

3 Percentage of US households with two TV sets: 34;

three or more TV sets: 40

4 Hours per day that TV is on in an average US home:

7 hours, 12 minutes

5 Percentage of Americans that regularly watch television while eating dinner: 66

6 Number of videos rented daily in the US: 6 million

7 Number of public library items checked out daily: 3 million 8 Chance that an American falls asleep with the TV on at least three nights a week: 1 in 4

9 Percentage of Americans who say they watch too much TV: 49

II. Children and Education

1 Number of minutes per week that the average American child ages 2-11 watches television: 1,197

2 Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 38.5

3 Percentage of children ages 5-17 who have a TV in their bedroom: 52

4 Percentage of children ages 2-5 who have a TV in their bedroom: 25

5 Percentage of day care centers that use TV during a typical day: 70

6 Percentage of parents who would like to limit their children's TV watching: 73

7 Percentage of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54

8 Hours per week of TV watching shown to negatively affect academic achievement: 10 or more

9 Percentage of 4th graders that watch more than 14 hours of television per week: 81

10 Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1,500

11 Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900

12 Chance that an American parent requires that children do their homework before watching TV: 1 in 12

13 Percentage of teenagers 13-17 who can name the city where the US Constitution was written (Philadelphia): 25

14 Percentage of teenagers 13-17 who know where you find the zip code 90210 (Beverly Hills): 75

III. Violence and Health

1 Number of violent acts that the average American child sees on TV by the age 18: 200,000

2 Number of murders witnessed by children on television by the age 18: 16,000

3 Percentage of Hollywood executives who believe there is a link between TV violence and real-life violence: 80

4 Percentage of children polled who said they feel 'upset' or scared by violence on television: 91

5 Percent increase in network news coverage of homicide between 1990 and 1995: 336

6 Percent reduction in the American homicide rate between 1990 and 1995: 13

7 Number of medical studies since 1985 linking excessive television watching to increasing rates of obesity: 12

8 Percentage of American children ages 6 to 11 who were seriously overweight in 1963: 4.5; In 1993: 14

9 Number of ads aired for 'junk-food' during four hours of Saturday morning cartoons: 202

IV. Commercialism

1 Number of TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 30,000

2 Number of TV commercials seen by the average American by age 65: 2 million

3 Percentage of toy advertising dollars spent on television commercials in 1997: 92

4 Percentage of Americans who believe that 'most of us buy and consume far more than we need': 82

V. General

1 Percentage of local TV news broadcast time devoted to advertising: 30

2 Percentage devoted to stories about crime, disaster and war: 53.8

3 Percentage devoted to public service announcements: 0.7

4 Total amount candidates spent on television ads during the 1996 political campaigns: $2.5 billion

5 Percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges: 59

6 Percentage of Americans who can name three Supreme Court Justices: 17

Compiled by TV-Free America, 1611 Connecticut Avenue, NW Suite 3A, Washington, DC 20009 (202) 887-0436

References

Donaldson, M. Children's Minds 1987 Ed. Fontana

Elkind, D. Miseducation: Pre-schoolers at Risk 1997 Knopf (orig. 1987)

Eliot, G. The Mill on the Floss 1985 Penguin Classics (orig. 1880)

Fromm, E. To Have or to Be 1997 Abacus (orig. 1976)

Glöckler, M. (notes from international Conference 'The Young Child', Dornach 1999)

Griffiths, J. The Morality of Time, Dartington Easter Conference Paper 1999 Humphries, S., Mack, J., Perks, R. A Century of Childhood 1988 Sidgwick&Jackson, London

Large, M. Out of the Box 2000 Steiner Education Vol 34 no. 2

Oppenheimer, T. Schooling the Imagination 1999 Atlantic Monthly, September issue, 1999

Rosen, M. The Penguin Book of Childhood 1994 Viking

Paley, V. G. The Kindness of Children 1999 Harvard

The Big Picture, Bright Futures Published by the Mental Health Foundation UK, 1999

Struck, Dr. Peter Movement and Sensory Disorders in Today's Children published in the Waldorf Education Research Bulletin Vol. IV 1999 (orig.1997)

Vogt, F. Drugs and Addiction 2000 Prevention through Education Brochure, International Association of Waldorf Kindergartens Inc., Stuttgart

Winn, M. The Plug-In Drug 1985 Penguin Books