Why did I get this book?
I always find Audrey Watters’ disciplined, focused and uncompromising critique of ed-tech very galvanizing and useful, so I was very much first in line to get this book as soon as it was published. After yesterday’s column on Packback, it seemed time for me to write about this book.
Is it what I thought it was?
Mostly. I really liked the focus on 20th Century teaching machines and the way that Watters’ uses this history to rethink more contemporary narratives about ed-tech and the way they present it as inevitable. I was a little surprised that the history is as tightly contained chronologically as it is and how focused she is on B.F. Skinner’s incorporation of teaching machines into his version of behavioral psychology, but I ended up really appreciating that choice. She’s completely right that we don’t really need a sweeping history of educational technology from the earliest writing systems right up to Duolingo—and that Skinner’s persistent pursuit of teaching machines is highly pertinent to the contemporary moment in more ways than one.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Lots, potentially. I can see incorporating it into several possible classes, or trying to build a project for the Aydelotte Foundation that would use the book as one starting point. It would also be a good book to read with colleagues. I’d like to think that it would also be a good book to lob at unthoughtful proponents of ed-tech (or neo-Skinnerist behaviorism like ‘nudging’) but in many ways the book might be too subtle and specific, allowing most of them to claim that none of this applies to them. The concluding chapter is a smart, focused polemic that could be handed to a lot of potential readers, at any rate, and if that made them curious about the claims being made, they could dive into the core of the book.
Quotes
“A student-run publication, the Ohio State University Monthly, also covered Pressey’s invention, although with a much wryer tone, quipping that if someone could just invent another machine that would punch the right answers into Pressy’s teaching machine, the future of education would be ‘perfect in the eyes of the student’. The article criticized a university culture that had become so focused on test taking and on cheating. Test taking wasn’t just drudgery for teachers; it was drudgery for students too.”
“This was the conundrum for the school system: educate the masses, but resist standardizing them; expose everyone to the same curriculum, in part to ‘Americanize’ them, but at the same time foster that core American value of individualism.”
“Perhaps this seems counterintuitive: to individualize education, one must automate it. To resist mechanistic education, schools must mechanize. But for education reformers in the early twentieth century (as for those in the early twenty-first), it was a conundrum they managed to justify. Indeed, this contradiction gets at the heart of class for ‘personalization’ and is central to a vision—then and now—of a modern, high-tech, progressive learning experience.”
“Of course, automation might replace the teacher entirely. Skinner and Pressey insisted that was never their intention, but the popular narrative has always floated the possibility that robot teachers are on the horizon. That was the future depicted in The Jetsons at least.”
“The researchers at Hollins College also quickly discovered that preparing their materials for a machine—be it an audio recorder or a film-based machine or a paper-tape system—was too cumbersome. The available machines were all too expensive, and the constant revisions to the programming materials—something that Susan Meyer Markle had touted as a key benefit to this new instructional technology—would mean that new filmstrips or tapes had to be produced continually. Teaching machines ‘only enriched the people who made machines,’ Sullivan complained; so, the Hollins team revised all their materials to work without them.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
One of the most important aspects of the book is its relentless uncovering of how the complaint that education was too industrial, standardized, rote, or dull has been more or less a continuous part of the institutional history of public education from the outset, and a consistent route for entrepreneurs, educators, intellectuals and others seeking to gain control of educational institutions or to displace rivals by accusing them of being the immobile remnants of an antiquated order—an order which in this rendering was always just as contemporaneous as the complaints against it. Watters thankfully doesn’t tell this story purely as an example of repeated folly from which no lessons were learnt, but instead as an expression of a series of unresolved contradictions embedded deeply inside American public education from its outset. But no matter how you interpret it, the recurrent use of teaching machines as one of the wedges that would-be reformers tried to use to gain greater access and control over educational institutions has to give anyone drawn to such arguments some pause, if they’ve got any self-reflection. I know I’ve been tempted from time to time by these kinds of “education is antiquated, industrial, rigid, standardized but the time has come to do something else” laments and this book is a strong reminder to seriously question those kinds of depictions wherever they arise, no matter how sympathetic you might be to the values or aspirations of a would-be reformer.
I found it very interesting to look at the justifications for these pre-Internet teaching machines. Skinner and Sidney Pressey earlier in the 1920s both focused on the logic of “labor-saving”, but not with the promise that teachers could be fired and replaced by teaching machines, e.g., it was not the contemporary argument of austerity proponents. Instead, what they argued was that teachers should be freed from the “mindless” labor of administering and grading tests so that they could do more valuable forms of teaching that required their professional skills and human capabilities. Pressley wrote that the teacher needed to be liberated from being a “clerical worker” to develop “fine enthusiasms, clear thinking and high ideals” in students.
Quite without meaning to, I’ve now found myself several weeks in a row contemplating the centrality of early to mid-20th Century psychology to troubled histories of institutional culture and practice, not just in education and in the workplace but across a broad span of civic life. I’m feeling the need to really think more closely about the intellectual and practical history of psychological thought.
This is one of those histories where a lot of the power of the account lies in how it relocates discussions and debates that many of us falsely believe to be a new part of our present challenges to past episodes that we’re not commonly inclined to think of as having any sort of contentiousness at all. Using film in classrooms has been so naturalized for so long that to discover that film was marketed as a novel form of “teaching machine” that would deliver learning without the need for direct human instruction—or that Scan-Tron tests had a long technological prelude—instantly makes more contemporary discussions feel very different. It’s also interesting to see repetitions of episodes where manufacturers who were already producing a technology whose markets were small or underdeveloped decide that it was possible to increase sales of their device by rebranding it as a teaching machine of some kind.
Watters draws tight constraints around the scope of the book. One minor theme that I did think could have used more attention is about students and teachers who encountered teaching machines “in the wild”, as it were—in those cases where prototypes or initial manufacturing runs arrived in actual classrooms, as well as more expansive popular envisionings of teaching machines in various kinds of futurist depictions of automation. Chapter 7 and 8 focus on this more but I think there’s more to say, and some of it weighs heavily on the designer-side, production-side account that Watters is mostly focused on. One thing that especially strikes me is that students, teachers and publics seem initially excited by the prospect of teaching machines (and then often quickly disillusioned) because they too feel convinced that education is industrialized, rote, dull, conforming—the idea that teaching machines might accelerate the process of learning and make it a painless and largely passive experience I think has felt to many like the promise of being rescued from an ordeal. There’s something in the mix in there that is not just about trying to gain authority over education, but also a rather “bottom-up” emotion or aspiration shared by many, even if it gets falsely told as an old history which must be overcome by contemporary futurity or technology. Think of Neo saying in surprise, “Whoa. I know kung fu” in The Matrix. I think part of what is at stake in that feeling is the temporality of modern education all the way up to the doctoral level—that we are trying to compress an ever-expanding volume of knowledge work and skills into as as compressed and finite a time period as possible in any given human life so that we are freed to create new knowledge or work towards our chosen futures at the earliest possible date of our individual lives. The promise of “labor saving”, before it was ever about austerity’s cruelties, was exactly this: we need to find ways to do the dull stuff quickly and easily so we have more time in our lives before death for the good stuff. Getting at how students and teachers think and feel in actual practice is really difficult in evidentiary terms, at any rate, but I really would have liked more along those lines.
The chapter on the “Roanoke Experience” (Chapter Eight) makes me think that we need a book on educational experiments and trends generally that is focused on nothing but what happens when the enthusiasm fades and it becomes clear that there’s no magic bullet in whatever the trend or idea was—when “grit” loses its luster or high-stakes standardized testing hurts more than helps, and on and on. The press generally doesn’t cover the slow dying-out of a once-lauded concept or technique; the proponents either stubbornly defend a smaller and smaller turf or they quietly retool and move on; the people who made money servicing the idea go out of business or jump to a new trend or fad.
The appearance of programmed instruction in Bob Moses’ Freedom Schools late in the book is startling and interesting—another familiar thing in the history of teaching machines, perhaps, is that at times they’ve attracted people on the left precisely because they seem to be something that could be disembedded from conventional educational institutions.
Another thing that could have used even more detailed attention, maybe, is that the one point where teaching machines following Skinner’s precepts were produced on a significant scale and sold at the same time encyclopedias were being marketed to homes as a way to give children an educational advantage, they ran into the basic difficulty that they were deeply tedious for an individual to use. I often feel the same way about “educational games”, which are often marketed as a kind of ludic form of teaching machine that will somehow educate the player in a painless fashion without the need for direct human intervention. The more palpably educational they are in their intent, the more certain it is that playing them is going to be profoundly boring, to be done only when compelled to do so. In a way, this is what I find encouraging in applying this to the present moment: that not only are claims that we live in a moment of sudden innovation displacing a long-static system simply empirically false, the existing history of teaching machines shows that most forms of auto-didactic products and promises fail because they cannot overcome some basic material characteristics of education or escape some fundamental contradictions in their own designs and aspirations. In her conclusion, Watters ascribes some of that failure to the active agency of people resisting educational technologies, both within technocratic ranks and among the students and teachers exposed to them. I think that’s right, but I also think there’s something deeply and materially untrue about what teaching machines have promised and still promise—that they are bound to fail at fulfilling the most expansive fantasies associated with them.