The Matrix Ate My Baby (Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice)

Parents and teachers are under increasing pressure to make decisions about the technologies that children can and should play with during their early years. The media, governments, toy companies, child advocacy organizations, and child development experts disseminate many, often contradictory, claims that influence practices of caring for and educating young children. The Matrix Ate My Baby explores these messages that adults receive regarding the values and dangers of new technologies, and of the importance of play. The book interrogates the value of play as an essential component of learning, and the essential role of play in a technological society's aspirations for progress. Drawing upon the philosophy of technology, this book provides parents, teachers and teacher educators with a critique of predominant perspectives regarding the young child's increasingly hi-tech world. It provides alternative perspectives of technology and education in order to emphasise the importance of questioning, and the value of difference, for early childhood educators, for parents of young children, and for research of the child's play with new, and old, technologies.