German Gil spends most of his waking hours looking at screens. Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015, the software engineer has bounced between start-ups and giants including Netflix, Facebook and GitHub. But when it came to the education of his daughter, Victoria, he wanted her to have a different experience, one in which his “kid could be a kid”.
Gil and his wife enrolled Victoria at the San Francisco Waldorf school, a private school built around nature-based play. Now in fourth grade, Victoria spends her school days free of screens. Instead of working on Chromebooks, the students in her class are binding books by hand.
This sort of experience doesn’t come cheap. Kindergarten tuition at the school, which sits in San Francisco’s affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood, just two miles from the headquarters of AI giant Anthropic, runs $40,000 a year; high school, close to $60,000. But the program is intensely popular.
It may seem a contradiction, but in the past years, many well-paid tech workers in Silicon Valley have paid a premium to keep their children away from the platforms they help build. Applications for early childhood enrollment at San Francisco Waldorf have grown notably, according to the school’s executive director, Lauren Smith, and many of the new parents work in tech. Now, parents in the region are pushing for changes beyond private school campuses to public districts, where screens have become a ubiquitous part of life in the classroom.
Parents in California tech enclaves such as Mountain View, San Mateo and others want public schools to re-embrace the emphasis on human connection over screen time that schools like San Francisco Waldorf offer. They are organizing, and they are making a dent, with some public schools banning phones or rolling back their use of computer-based tests and assignments. As evidence mounts of the damage social media and other platforms do to young people – and as courts have begun to agree – parents, and governments, have started to re-evaluate kids’ relationship with tech, and its role in education.
Major US school districts such as New York City and Los Angeles have recently embraced tech rollbacks. Parents in other countries, too, are increasingly scrutinizing tech’s encroachment into education. Silicon Valley parents bring something to this fight that many other communities don’t have: firsthand knowledge of the industry.
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