Caught Between the Culture Industry and the Technocratic Reform of Education

Included are:
1. The threat from the culture industry to the opportunities of child development The acquisition of basic capabilities through play – Play and technological competence – The screen media competes with play – Children’s free play is threatened by the culture industry – ‘Rapid-fire culture’: Violence and frenzy in the surrounding world of children – Bodily consequences of the culture of stress

2. Screen culture: Damage to the spiritual, social and physical development of children Do television and computer games cause changes in the brain of the child? - The effect of television and computer games on the cognitive capabilities of children – Once more: Modern electronic media: good or bad builders of the brain? – General education and technical civilization

3. The humanistic-aesthetic and the technocratic-economic model of education Trends of education politics and the history of mentality in pedagogy – Education or instruction? The repression of humanistic educational goals by technocratic-economic plans for education - The mechanization of the child’s world – The “post-modern” counter-model to technocracy

4. Childhood: Aspects of the body and the soul. Once more: Education in children’s play – About the relationship between “center” (brain) and “periphery” (torso and limbs) – The biological shortening of childhood: The phenomena of acceleration.

Translated by Grant Overstone

keywords: international Waldorf education; education reform; media; brain development