Maurice de Hond: Give Babies iPads

Trust children. Our whole education system is distrusting children. You have to do this and this, and I will check, and if you don't do this ... Children, my daughter is now almost six. See what she learned outside school!

I had my daughter when she was six months old I downloaded an app for a baby, a rattler, so she made noise, and my daughter was playing a little bit with it. So I think when she was 1 1/2 I had the iPad in my house, and I noticed that she knew how to handle it, so I downloaded apps for her, like for example an app with twelve animals, different animals, a drawing, and if you said "Cat!" she had to push "Cat", then you got the noise of a cat and a picture of a cat. And there were four different noises of four different, so the animals she knew in, let's say, ten minutes. Then we did it with cars .. or what we did? The household things. So one week later she knew all the 72 components. Or she did all kinds of memory games type of things. Or when she was almost three, she started to be, and that's a very interesting app, Tocaboca-Tailor, she started to designing fashion. In a very simple way but the outcome is incredible. She made 150 different designs. And I noticed what I never was aware with my other children that apparently even a young child is a very creative brain but we don't know it because it's inside the body, what can I do so much, cannot talk so well, cannot write, cannot explain everything. But now she showed me that she was already very intelligent. Not very intelligent, I think each child could do what my daughter did. And then I also realized, and that's the big problem with all those people who are skeptical about young children this and that, that's a story of when I was young I had Elvis Presley and the Beatles. And all the older people thought that music is terrible. Young people liked it. So a lot of things I hear about young people shouldn't do this and this and this is a generation conflict, so it's not thought about individual research but is done by normative thinking. And I know that so well because I saw my daughter, my wife is Cuban, my daughter has many cousins in Cuba of the same age, so when I go to Cuba I see the difference between my daughter and those children in Cuba who still live in the Fifties in many ways. And it's a great life I mean, and when my daughter is there she walks with bare feet outside in the street. But I can see that my daughter knows maybe 400 animals, and they know only seven animals, the only animals they see in their surrounding. And everybody also makes a kind of funny story like "If a child is working on an iPad then that's the only thing that she's doing". That for 24 hours of the day they work on the iPad. Of course not! She plays with normal puppets. She likes to paint on paper. But a part of her creativity and development is done by a tool that gives her much more satisfaction and also much more challenge that the tools of the past.

When I go to the school of my son, I visited it some years ago, and the classroom was exactly the same like 32 years ago. And then I saw my daughter when she was two working herself with an iPad and doing things and showing my things I never thought that children at that age could do. And then I thought: Why should I send my daughter to a school that prepares children still for the 1990s instead of 2030? Because that's when she's 20, and that's the year 2030. And then my decision was either she stays home or I try to start a school. And in the Netherlands that's possible. We have a constitution that when several parents want to start a school and you are inside specific guidelines the government has to allow it and even to finance it, so we could start a public school, financed by the government, with our own goals, and that's what happened.

We have many visitors not only from the Netherlands but even more from abroad, from really all over the world. Last week we had the Ministry of Youth Affairs of Austria with a delegation, and each one comes in with a firm thinking about what is that type of school that all the children are all the time only with the iPad? Do they have any social contact? Do they still write? And so on. Do they do sport or so? When they come into our school, in ten minutes they understand. In ten minutes they understand what makes it so different and then comes the shock that then they understand, if this happens here and the children are happy and are well organized and well disciplined and work all the time with a lot of energy, how bad is basically what we are doing for children? Because this is almost ... everybody says this is the way to go. This is I saw the future. And then when they think about or tell me about what would be the problems at home, the biggest problem especially in Germany but in many other countries because the government decided what you have to do in school. And that's decided by old men of 50 years and older who see that the best education is esactly a copy of the education they had 30, 40 years ago. So in that way they imprisoned the children in their past under the pretense that they prepare them for the future. But there are some people who don't want to think in problems but only want to think in solutions an who understand if they don't change that's bad for children. And they want to be good for children. So we see in different countries and different places the real education heros who say: This is what I should do for the children, so I do it. And my experience is that what a ot of people define as restrictions are mostly restrictions in their minds. And it's a kind of defense line. I want to do it better but it's impossible. It's not impossible. But if you really believe in it, you can find a way to do it in a completely other way, still inside guidelines. And mainly, I mean if you are parent, why are we accepting in schools, and that's, I notice with many people who told me after they brought his or her child to school, that they said: I have a happy child now at home. He's working, and he didn't do that last time, and I always thought that he was to blame. I always thought the last two, three, four years the problems in school with their child was because he was lazy, not intelligent or whatever. Now I understand that it was not he or she, it was the system, and he revolted against the system. What I thought was he was to blame. So if you are really correct against your children, and if you really have your heart into education, if you are coming to our school you understand how wrong the current system is.