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From technologia to technism: A critique on technology’s place in education
The last decade has witnessed a growing discourse within educational research about the necessity of computer technology as the primary tool to educate for a democratic citizenry. Such claims incorporate assumptions about the meaning and function of "technology" unrecognized by researchers who advocate technology as an instructional tool to develop democratic "skills." A fundamental assumption is technological determinism, an uncritical posture toward computer technology—the Internet in particular—that signifies technology as the inevitable engine propelling America towards its moral imperative to be the dominant force in the world. According to principles of determinism, technology is a neutral tool for the manipulation and control of information, and as such exists outside of cultural, political or personal critique. Once control is established, a consensus of use and obeisance to its practices are assumed, making dissent or alternative viewpoints difficult and unlikely.
This deterministic impulse serves an old cultural metanarrative of American exceptionalism operating in both religious and secular language. We examine historical precedents for this emphasis and reliance on technology by tracing some of technological determinism's roots within the US educational system, beginning specifically with the New England Puritans first Harvard curriculum, called "technologia," analyze how these notions became embedded within current perceptions of technology, and discuss the implications for education and democracy—particularly how, by ignoring the historical precedent, researchers may actually be reproducing past structures and limiting democratic promise of technology.
Over the last decade an increasing number of academic and mainstream publications have claimed the necessity of approaching computer technology as the primary tool to educate for a democratic citizenry. The discourse claims are problematic and predicated on a logic incorporating assumptions about the meaning and function of "technology" unrecognized by researchers who advocate technology as an instructional tool to develop democratic "skills." A fundamental assumption within this discourse is technological determinism, an uncritical posture toward computer and communication technology that signifies technology as the inevitable engine propelling America towards its moral imperative and destiny as the dominant force in the world. According to principles of determinism, technology is a neutral tool for the manipulation and control of information, and as such exists outside of cultural, political or personal critique. Once control is established, a consensus of use and obeisance to its practices are assumed, making dissent or alternative viewpoints difficult and unlikely (Bowers, 1988, 2000; Feenberg, 1999).
This deterministic impulse serves an old cultural and problematic metanarrative represented in both American religious and secular language (McKnight, 2004; Bercovitch, 1978, 1993). Within a religious typology America is still a child of the New England Puritans, who inscribed America as the "city upon a hill" from which radiated the "light of the world." This "light" was a component of the "errand" that gave order to the primitive "wilderness" in an effort to animate the divine plan. This spiritualized purpose began as a figural map, but was eventually made literal in America as Christianity was wedded to other state sanctioned institutions such as technocratic democracy and capitalism. The secular camp has made sacred the moral imperatives of freedom, democracy, equality and citizenry, with the same sense of America as the stage upon which all significant historical action occurs as the rest of the world watches.
This narrative includes expectations of American spiritual, economic, moral and military predominance in the world, with technology as the tool to make it happen (Bercovitch, 1993; Bowers, 2000; Bromley, 1998; Kaplan, 2001; McKnight, 2004). Technology as a tool to act upon and organize these deterministic impulses has been a part of the American landscape since the New England Puritans developed the notion of technologia as an educational discourse to sustain their own sense of the divine plan for America. For seventeenth-and-early-eighteenth–century America, technologia was the Puritan theoretical framework by which to integrate and contemplate both the explicit secular and implicit revelatory forms of knowledge believed necessary to live a virtuous life and develop an understanding of God's plan. However, technologia's sense of messy contemplation of virtue and "right living," which allowed for ambiguity and personal inquiry, faded in favor of technology/technist formulas of rationalized thought and reasoning. This technist mode focused on efficient control of the individual within a "democratic" society while retaining its moral claim as the map guiding American to become that "city on a hill."
This technist discourse map continues to govern the direction of educational thought. For example, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS, n.d.)--the US organizational body of social educators which has laid historical and political claims as the curriculum discipline to cultivate an informed democratic citizenry--possesses an intense interest in technology and curriculum research (e.g., Berson, Lee & Stuckart, 2001; Bolick, Berson, Coutts & Heinecke, 2003; Fairey, Lee, & Bennett, 2000; Glenn, 1990; Mason, Berson, Diem, Hicks, Lee & Dralle, 2000; Van Benschoten, 2000; White, 1997; Whitworth & Berson, 2003). Much social education research begins by assuming that computer technology and the Internet is a neutral, necessary and normative form of progress in education and, hence, must be adopted and integrated into all classrooms to more effectively achieve social education citizenship goals and standards as stated by NCSS. However, with a few exceptions (e.g. Postman, 2000; Ross, 2000; Stanley, 2001), those involved with research on technology within the social studies fail to grapple with, much less acknowledge, the preponderance of historical, social and critical theory literature that interrogates and problematizes the very technological deterministic discourse and its underlying metanarrative upon which much of the research is based. Concerns lodged within the acritical social education discourse have been basically twofold: the massive expansion of computer technologies in all levels of schooling; and the degree to which such technological application is effective in increasing "achievement." An illustration of this is a resource databases created and maintained by Michael Berson of the University of South Florida, USA, who is considered to be a leading social studies and technology researcher. The database is located on his website, and while he acknowledged it is selective, his choices are at the same time telling. Of the more than 500 resources listed, about 10 could be viewed as critical examinations of the philosophical and socio-cultural implications and assumptions of technological thinking in the social studies and curriculum. In short, there is little critical interrogation of the metanarrative upon which the research finds its overall trajectory.
The absence of examination of this technological determinism discourse has led to a perception of technology as a neutral tool existing outside of culture, and hence, beyond cultural politics and historical inscription (Apple, 1988; Bowers, 2000; Feenberg, 1999). An unintended result is the appropriation of a narrowly constructed, technocratic discourse that (a) reduces democratic activity to retrieving, storing and analyzing data bits, (b) confuses facts with knowledge (Landoli & Norris, 1997), and (c) fails to consider the ethical, philosophical, social and cultural implications of technology on democracy and the individual's condition within this form of corporate existence (Apple, 1988; Bowers, 2000, 1998; Bromley, 1998; Postman, 1993). Placing research about technology and curriculum within an uncritical, under-theorized narrative framework of determinism that accepts the computer as a culturally neutral tool diminishes the very democratic agency that social education researchers claim to be seeking, and silences alternative perspectives (Bromley, 1998; Bowers, 1988; Feenberg, 1992, 1999; Levin, 1998; Lyotard, 1984; Postman, 1993; Santora, 2001; Zambon, 2003).
American Puritan Technologia
Even when discussing the failures and problems with information technology as applied to curriculum disciplines, or when acknowledging the need to go beyond a pure focus on technological efficiency, researchers do not question the inevitability of technology.
Such exceptionalist thinking falls within longstanding historical, religious and literary traditions in America. Well elucidated in intellectual history and historiographical research, such determinism in American thought is in part a residue of Whig historians' development of the American narrative of exceptionalism in which the historical endpoint of the nation was pre-destined, either by some deity, providence or by forces of nature (Noble, 1965). The Whigs were the cultural inheritors of this exceptionalist sensibility by way a gift of a symbolic corporate narrative assembled by the New England Puritans. Embedded in much of this Puritan literature was a powerful spiritual purpose to build, literally and figuratively, a "city upon the hill" as part of God's biblical plan to begin a new reign as foretold in the Christian Bible (Bercovitch, 1993; McKnight, 2003). Crucial to the perceived success of this "errand" (Miller, 1957) was a particular understanding of technology and education.
For the Puritans, technology was not an object to be manipulated, but instead an organizing principle that operated in every aspect of their spiritual, academic, economic and social daily life. This condition was highly theorized at the Puritan academic institutions, notably the first American college, Harvard, founded during the 1630s to develop intellectual/religious leaders for New England. This was significant for later educational institutions, as Harvard produced the foundational curriculum and instruction ideologies and philosophical frameworks that guided later institutional thinking about education on a national scale, long after the New England Puritan culture diffused and lost its unique coherence (Hoeveler, 2002; McKnight, 2003).
Harvard's curriculum was organized around and by the principles of technologia, represented as a circle of piety connecting the secular subject content, theology, an experience of the divine, and the individual engaging in the imperative of seeking his [sic] vocation. Harvard was closed to women, who, for the most part, received an education at home to prepare them for domestic duty. It was also closed to all others outside those who identified themselves as Congregationalists. Such exclusivity functioned within their own discourse of a divine plan and the perception of certain New England men as protectors and main actors within the spiritual war against good and evil. For the Puritans, who existed within a patriarchal cultural framework (which they inscribed upon the New World), technologia was an expression of the European white, male subject's desire to know God by revealing His [sic] plan for each individual. As such, it was a "devotional method" (Scott, 2002) that turned every action in life into one of piety. Perry Miller (1954) spoke of the significance of technologia as no less than the philosophical framework for integrating Puritan piety and logic/intellect. In effect, technologia was a metaphysical discourse map that guided not only the overall corporate symbolic narrative of the "errand into the wilderness," but also provided a map for each individual to follow in living the virtuous life.
While it may have been considered America's destiny to serve some cosmic purpose, the Puritans, being good Calvinists, saw it as their responsibility to develop earthly, concrete means by which to take on that task and responsibility. Technology as an organizing, administrative, and interpretive principle was highly theorized at Harvard during the 1600s and early 1700s, not with any democratic notions in mind, but certainly with the goal of creating an informed, ethical citizen able to function within the overall scheme of the corporate symbolic narrative. For the Puritans, technology was a philosophical and theological tool of inquiry and "right living," which translated as the concrete activity in the world that would secure and deliver forth their vision of the divine plan.
Figure 1: Ames's Technometry (or curriculum)
More specifically, Harvard's technologia curriculum was an adoption of William Ames's (1633/1979) Technometry (considered a synonym of technologia), a philosophical treatise that became a curricular format to integrate both spiritual and secular knowledge through the arts and sciences (Gibbs, 1979; Triche & McKnight, 2004). As Gibbs (1979), commentator and translator of Ames's philosophy, writes:
This general philosophic framework, which was really an encyclopedic outline summary of all knowledge, Ames called 'technometry' (technometria) or 'technology' (technologia). A systematic delineation of the nature and uses of art in general and of each of the individual liberal arts, it provided . . . the integration of theology with all of the other disciplines. ... It provided a blueprint of knowledge for colonial New England. (p. viii)
Ames's technometry is significant in that it was far more than a neutral framework for regulating knowledge toward certain utilitarian prescribed ends that assumed the condition of being a self-evident good. Neutrality was never claimed, nor desired. Instead, his notion of technology was infused with spiritual and ethical ideologies that were to be integrated into its use. Ames constructed the term by appropriating ancient Greek philosopher's notions of techne, which refers to art, craft or skill that enables one to function well within cultural contexts—as in the skill one achieved over time in making shoes or pottery—and added logia to it, thereby producing the study of a skill or art. Ames defined technologia as the "precognition of all the arts which adequately circumscribes the boundaries and ends of all the arts and of every art" (1633/1979, p.93). One brief example of how technologia functioned comes from the Harvard Commencement Theses of 1678, which each graduate had to be able to publicly defend, and many of which were pulled almost verbatim from Ames's Technometry (1633/1979): "Art is the ordered gathering and combining of understanding, science, wisdom, and prudence. Cf. thesis 10 of 1691: Wisdom, prudence, science and art do not really differ" (as cited in Gibbs, 1979, p. 43).
In Technometry Ames lays out a system of the arts and then, due to the Puritan emphasis on vocation, goes about illustrating application, everything from calligraphy to paper making to hunting. Hence, technologia as a means of organizing life was understood within a cultural context as having integrated political, economic, theoretical, practical, ethical and theological import. A hunter did not just understand the "technical" aspects of hunting, but instead understood how each component achieved within the temporal work was infused with spirituality. Both components had to be harmonized. In other words, technometry was inherently ethical as well as spiritual due to the need for the American Puritans to bring into line both explicit knowledge (which was referred to as secular knowledge) and implicit knowledge (which for the Puritans was the knowledge of the supernatural, the knowledge one felt) (Holifield, 2003). It was believed that because the world was God's creation, and because God acted in accordance with reason (philosophy) then His [sic] meaning could be apprehended not only through biblical study or immediate experience, but also through reason, and later, even through empirical study (Holifield, 2003; Gibbs, 1979; Scott, 2002). The belief was that such a balance was necessary in the effort to identify what God had in mind for one's curricula vita (course in life) and specifically to reveal how to live the "right kind" of life on earth, which of course, meant the kind of life that also preserved the communal, and eventually, national identity. For the Puritans, such training was to result in eupraxia, the art of right living, which meant the integration and balance of human reason and spiritual faith in a way that was visible in one's day to day life and that corresponded to the larger symbolic narrative.
Technologia as a curriculum, which means that curriculum was understood as far more than a course of study, remained entrenched in Harvard and Yale into the eighteenth century, but gradually faded as the so called "New Learning," represented by the writings of Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Descartes, and John Locke, took root at institutions of higher learning. To assert that the New Learning submerged the more explicit religious attitudes and impulses is somewhat misleading. For even as the humanists gradually replaced the scholastics' more direct attempt to use philosophy and science to prove the existence and read the mind of God, the impulse to "know God" persevered, as historians of science have well illustrated. This shift in discourse could often hide the same interior impulses. For instance, substituted for the Puritan notion of America as a "city upon a hill" was Manifest Destiny, and then finally Progress (Bercovitch, 1993), all of which were and are predicated upon the notion of America as exceptional in both the spiritual and worldly sense. And whereas the Puritans were intent on applying technologia as a means to parse out the interior landscape of the individual in an effort to map out for the individual the correct life of one existing within a corporate narrative, the New Learning was interested in employing technology to parse nature toward the same ends. For both discourses, control was the crucial element.
In the New Learning, the various disciplines were separated out and boundary markers set up. Hence, one no longer considered integrating theology and ethics with physics or natural history (Gibbs, 1979; Holifield, 2003). In other words, knowledge began the process of becoming specialized, fragmented and obeying the laws of rationalization (Siegel, 1990). As Siegel writes, while previously the object of scholarly study "was the unity of all knowledge [technologia] and that proper method was contemplation alone," this view was replaced by the "secular attitude that the primary focus of study should be individual subjects and that knowledge was best derived through demonstration (induction) and experimentalism" (p. 335). In other words, a shift occurred from contemplation to demonstration, an act that fragmented knowledge into specializations and created "technologies"--disciplinary ways of inquiry--to sustain each specialization. Such action effectively eliminated any reflexive ethical or moral inquiry. Simply, technology was transformed into an applied "neutral tool" to manipulate and control knowledge within newly recognized independent specializations considered necessary for efficient social organization within the academy and larger society.
Accordingly, discussion and analysis of technology as an organizing framework shifted away from what could be called theological and holistic concerns of education. Technology was detached from political theory's interest in what constituted moral and ethical society, in effect separating means and ends. Instead, technology, removed from issues of rights and responsibilities and their inherent social ramifications, became perceived as but a neutral means by which to bring about certain desired ends.
Technology as Rationalized Neutral Tool
By the mid nineteenth century, technology had become a basic "fact" of life. Technology was placed within the domain of common sense instrumentalism, which employed it as a tool to manipulate the individual and the social without having to accept any problematic political or social outcomes embedded within the technological principles themselves. A contemporary and poignant example of the logic behind technology as a neutral tool is the saying, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Such ideology strips the inherent moral and ethical intentions that went into the creating of the gun and instead places it outside the tool and onto the agent manipulating it. Technology as a neutral tool without political or cultural implications translated into a kind of cultural blind spot: philosophical, social and political justification was no longer necessary. In other words, one has to offer no justification for wielding a gun as long as the appropriate legal requirements are met.
Technology was sometimes awesome and horrifying, as was evident in the massive technology of firearms developed during the American Civil War, but it was never questioned as something to forsake. Although technology was inscribed as a neutral tool, powerful American exceptionalist impulses did not dissipate. While technology no longer carried any cultural or spiritual significance as an organizing principle by which one went about living his or her life, it now served a new master—Humanist's faith in Progress toward a more perfect (Re. ordered) society, a 'city on a hill' albeit without moral, ethical and spiritual theorization. Technology now was the means to procure the ideology of rational thought and institutional mechanisms giving order to society, a form of utopianism. As Feenberg (1999) writes, "technical progress was believed to ground humanity's advance toward freedom and happiness" (p.2), both of which considered natural ends to be pursued in life.
Technology's success was most observable in the capitalistic notions of technical division and control of labor in the name of efficiency and productivity. Technology as an administrative discourse became intertwined with the economic assumptions of capitalism and developed into a kind of secular theology for America, with technical rationalization of modern life possessing the same basic attributes as the Christian, and more specifically Calvinistic, ideological and moral impulses (as perpetuated by New England Puritans). Hence, instead of notions of pre-destination, of the determinism of God's divine plan as interpreted by Puritan/Calvinist theologians, the humanist discourse, reified through capitalistic material growth, became that of the determinism of a better, more ordered and perfect society through technological, rationalist means (Apple, 1988; Bromley, 1998; Wiebe, 1967, 1969).
Feenberg (1999) identified two premises upon which this re-fashioned determinism rested. First, "Technical progress appears to follow a unilinear course, a fixed logical track, from less to more advanced configurations. Each stage of technological development enables the next, and there are no branches off the main line. Societies may advance slowly or quickly, but the direction and definition of progress is not in question" (p. 77). Second, all social institutions must adhere to the technological "imperatives," which states that "adopting a technology necessarily constrains one to adopt certain practices that are connected with its employment" (p.77).
Social theorists in the late 1800s and early 1900s began to critique the narrative of technological rationalism, as applied to institutional systems throughout society. Especially insightful was Max Weber, who developed the notion of rationalization as an "iron cage" that dehumanizes anyone within its sphere of use, as well as notions of technicist, bureaucratic rationality that assumed technology and technological systems as neutral tools to be used by institutions to maintain order, efficiency and productivity. When Weber (1958) discussed technological systems or technocracy, he was referring to systems of organization that governed institutional practices and that gain legitimacy through expertism rather than tradition or law (Feenberg, 1999).
In effect, the overarching social imperative became control: "modernity is characterized by the increasing role of calculation and control in social life" (Weber, 1958, p. 181-182), which, in effect, produced the "iron cage." This cage shifted the perception of human beings from producers to objects or raw material to be given order and direction toward what was considered human beings' "natural" biological ends of seeking security and happiness. Again, Weber identified the common sense instrumentalism in which technology was not perceived as changing the nature of human beings, but instead as a tool that shortened the path towards human beings natural ends (i.e. security and happiness).
Most significant for our purposes here is how technological (technicist) thinking appropriated the role of an imperative that weakened older notions of democracy and agency. "In medicine, education, and administration, technical devices prescribe norms to which the individual is tacitly committed by organizational belonging. Technocracy is the use of technical delegations to conserve and legitimate an expanding system of hierarchical control" (Feenberg, 1999, p. 75). To understand how this control is established we return to the neutrality assumption that situates technology as a tool beyond cultural, political or personal critique. This control results in a type of use that only accepts consensus and acquiescence to its practices, which in turn creates uncompromising conditions again dissent or alternative viewpoints be delivered. Consequently, and following both Weber (1958) and Heidegger (1977), this technocratic condition reduces notions of citizenship to a
[c]onscientious performance in mindless subordinate roles. The public sphere withers; a literal reign of silence is instituted as one-way communication replaces dialogue and debate throughout society…The resulting weakness of democratic interventions into technology is symptomatic. The fundamental problem of democracy today is quite simply the survival of agency in this increasingly technocratic universe. (Feenberg, 1999, p.76)
The metanarrative of technological determinism is sustained because technology is viewed as neutral, and therefore beyond reproach. Research highlighting the failures of technology to improve classroom practices or society is explained in terms of the use of technology, not in terms of inherent qualities, even limitations, of the technology.
An example of such determinism is the belief that computer and communication technologies can be used within the classroom to foster critical thinking through instructional strategies that teach students the "skills" to "access," "assess" the quality of, and "collect" information in an effort to "analyze," "manipulate" and "store" this data (Glenn, 1990). In short, critical thought, a proxy for informed democratic citizenry, is reduced to an acquisition of skills. This data-centered "retrieve-assess-manipulate-store" approach is intimately tied to the larger instrumentalist discourse of technology and reduces ways of knowing to the explicit and concrete, at the expense of the implicit, intuitive and subjective.
Explicit and Implicit Knowledge Games
The technological language of the computer has defined what sort of information is useful, which in a classroom means documents, facts and dates easily stored, accessed and analyzed. This sort of information presents itself also as neutral and accurate. However, what is accessed merely replicates standard information -- data that can be assessed and stored, a condition that is called explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge equates into numbers and words that can be easily input into a computer and transmitted from individual to individual, from computer to computer. Such information-based knowledge is quickly stored, recalled and turned into a visual representation of some sort. Explicit knowledge is formalized, denotative, exclusive of all other discourse forms of knowledge and can be easily articulated through formulas, maps, standards, graphs and so on (Lyotard, 1984).
The other pole involves narrative or implicit knowledge, which is contextually and culturally based, flexible, contingent upon one's temporality and historicity and is not easily electronically transmittable. This is not to say that implicit knowledge does not involve technical skill, but it is a skill of intuition and "know-how" learned over a long set of experiences. It cannot be a didactic form of knowledge acquisition, but a narrative form of knowing that leads to particular skills over a long period of time. To be communicated, implicit or narrative knowledge must be reduced and given form through words or numbers that can be easily conveyed through whatever pedagogic means. However, in doing so, the subjective nature and intuitive insight attempting to be communicated may be lost.
In his study of the non-neutrality of educational computing, Bowers (1988) draws out the tendency of such thinking to approach social problems as technical and bureaucratic ones that can be solved through accessing the "correct" sort of objective knowledge (facts), which can "be rationally manipulated in order to provide the authority for decision-making ... and reinforces the belief that change can be rationally planned" (p. 6). This privileged discourse leads to an emphasis on information, which requires a student to become technologically "literate" (re: able to access and manipulate data) through clearly designated instructional practices. What constitutes data is heavily standardized. Access is controlled by "appropriate" instruction to ensure that the data fits within acceptable categories of evidence. This discourse privileges explicit knowledge that is easily manipulated:
In its present form this mind-set recognizes only explicit forms of knowledge that allow for an abstract-theoretical formulation of the problem. Explicit knowledge is thus interpreted as that which can be observed, treated as fact or as a quantifiable, calculable measure… Schools have become the chief means of providing the conceptual foundations necessary for advanced knowledge required to operate and develop further the sophisticated technology upon which our consumer society now depends.
This involves teaching students to think in a manner that is compatible with the social-engineering processes that keep our commodity culture from falling into a state of permanent destabilization. Students thus learn to think in abstract-decontextualized ways, segment experience in component parts, and recognize that the quantification experience represents the highest source of intellectual authority. (Bowers, 1988, pp. 8, 10)
Bowers' analysis reflects a similar critique presented by Martin Heidegger (1977), who had identified this notion of how technological language shapes and influences what is considered useful or not useful knowledge. Heidegger (1977) wrote that the technological approach transforms language into something that ostensibly merely reports or transmits, yet in fact does much more. The very machine itself, meaning the computer in this instance, reduces the possibilities of language to "a sequence of continual yes-no decisions with the highest possible speed" (p. 140). In effect, a student's language, a teacher's language, the language of the classroom, and simply, the language of what it means to be a democratic citizen must conform to the logic of technology and technological-calculative principles.
Any information or alternative ways of thinking, if they fall outside the logic as mediated by the computer, which deems only explicit knowledge that can be quantified, stored and analyzed, is excluded even as the amount of information that can be accessed continues to increase exponentially. A democratic citizenry dependent on explicit forms of knowledge inevitably leads to a loss of implicit, local knowledge that constitutes so much of our daily, cultural existence, those "unspoken rules that govern the use of different language systems – spoken, body, space, time and so forth – to changes in social context, performing skills and pursuing activities" (Bowers, 1988, p. 8).
Such implicit knowledge functions to preserve the many cultural voices that give American democracy its diversity, and hence, its staying power, and resists the rationalistic reduction of democratic life to the manipulating and disseminating of information produced by a small elite group in the various disciplines accepted as legitimate. When discussing technology and education, such social wisdom does not fit into what is judged as acceptable data, meaning what websites and technology are considered appropriate to access.
The effect of this is that the many diverse voices that inhabit and infuse cyberspace with true democratic potential are blocked to teacher candidates, teachers and students (Bowers, 1988). As others (e.g., Gitlin, 1996; Labaree, 1992; McKnight, 2004) have illustrated, students engage in this act of reproduction the moment they enter into the institution of schooling. Students embody what criteria constitutes the explicit privileged forms of knowledge as information and easily gravitate, when involved in classroom or homework activities, toward replicating this type of information without being directed. In fact, such undirected movement is considered critical thought, for it is the student performing the task toward a prescribed end without overt teacher guidance. This individual may become technically proficient at accessing and disseminating information, but is unable to understand how to interpret subtleties and ambiguities, an act dependent upon the implicit knowledge necessary to navigate the complex set of cultures that constitute America.
Concluding Remarks
In effect, if a critical conversation does not take place, then technology as an instrument will less and less be at the disposal of humanity and will instead become the tool that wields us. For example, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), in its most recent Professional Standards (2002) document, prominently displays the word technology 62 times. In this document, technology is presented as one of the most significant tools for teacher candidates to increase K-12 student achievement. NCATE (2002) has infused the technology-as-neutral tool mentality in every standard for which teacher education departments are held accountable, yet nowhere is it required for teacher candidates to critically examine the socio-cultural assumptions and effects underpinning its use. In fact, NCATE has moved into the realm of virtue ethics by holding teacher education departments accountable for guaranteeing that all teacher candidates possess a disposition to use of technology as an instructional device. Teachers are expected to identify technology as an inherent good that when used properly results in student achievement (following the same "guns don't kill people" logic). Consideration of technology as a philosophical principle to be interrogated and questioned as to its effects on students and teachers alike is not an issue for NCATE.
No one can argue against the capability of technology to allow us to go faster and produce more, or medical technologies' success in saving lives, or military technologies success in taking lives. To argue for the removal of technology from classrooms would mean falling prey to the same exceptionalist thinking that has continually plagued schooling and society, from the Puritans to current technophiles. Any course of action, regardless of the curricular program, taken blindly in the name of "bettering" our classrooms or "progressing" our society, is inherently foreclosed to critique.
Rather than advocating any particular program, we call for a process of inquiry that acknowledges our human frailties, obsession for power and control, and lack of foresight given the complex, chaotic social systems we call schooling. Such acknowledgement can enable K-12 and teacher educators and researchers to enter critical conversations about educational "progress," "technologies," and "democratic citizenship" without these ideals being closed hermeneutic circles. Anything else is democratically deadly as one cashes in the many nuanced and complex voices of the implicit for the explicit and pre-determined. If this inquiry begins to see its way into education discussions and research, then perhaps the field can begin to reflect on the place of technology beyond an idealized utopian romanticism (guns don't kill people).
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