Putting a computer in front of a child and expecting it to teach him is like putting a book under his pillow, only more expensive.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.
Being personally acquainted with a number of Waldorf students, I can say that they come closer to realizing their own potential than practically anyone I know.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the adult imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We adults continue to have our children.
A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.
Science promised man power. But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price is servitude and impotence. Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose.
The salvation of the world depends only on the individual whose world it is. At least, every individual must act as if the whole future of the world, of humanity itself, depends on him. Anything less is a shirking of responsibility and is itself a dehumanizing force, for anything less encourages the individual to look upon himself as a mere actor in a drama written by anonymous agents, as less than a whole person, and that is the beginning of passivity and aimlessness.
The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age has been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entrained, then there has been no computer revolution. And however the present age is to be characterized, the computer is not eponymic of it.
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.