It probably doesn’t matter if childrem have a low-tech or high-tech education provided their parents are interested and encouraging. But some employees of Silicon Valley’s biggest digital companies are opting to educate their own children sans computers. An excerpt from Matt Richtel’s New York Times article on the topic:

“While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.”

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Miss Crabtree didn’t need electronic gizmos to keep Chubbsy Ubbsy enrapt: