Childhood Unplugged

The Silicon Valley titans who got our children addicted to tech are now sending their own kids to screen-free schools. Danny Fortson finds out why

- Danny Fortson

Inside a concrete block in San Francisco, 27 nine-year-olds are handed needles and instructed to sew. Across the hall, eight-year-olds churn butter by hand, while downstairs four-year-olds are busy with their duties: washing dishes, sweeping up and dehydrating fruit.

This is not a child-labor camp in the heart of America’s richest city. It is a school, and among the tech crowd, it has become much sought after. The San Francisco Waldorf School, you see, has a strict “no-screens” policy. In fact, it is deliberately “analog”, a throwback to a time when it was all blackboards, pencils and paper – but with a new-age twist. And in the crucible of the global technology industry, the same executives who have flooded the world with smartphones and addictive social-media apps happily pay up to $60,000 a year to wall off their kids from their creations.

Janice Lucena, a designer, and her husband, John, a Google software engineer, have had their six-year-old twins at this Waldorf School – they’re known as Steiner Schools in Australia and the UK – since kindergarten. The pair have thrived, Lucena says, in screen-less education. “Living here, technology is everywhere,” she explains. “I wanted our kids to have a technology-free start, so that they would be playing and running around and picking up leaves and getting dirty, rather than sitting inside and watching a screen. It didn’t feel like giving our children access to so much technology so soon was a good choice.”

It may be galling, and it is certainly ironic, but the rising popularity of tech-free education in Silicon Valley is not surprising.