EXPLORING THE MIDDLE GROUND:
A REPLY TO BLACKER

Mark Selman
Simon Fraser University

David Blacker’s critical examination of the way in which education and technology interact is both timely and significant. Technological change has an ever increasing impact on our lives in almost any context one can think of and we can expect it to intrude more and more directly into specifically educational contexts. The Dean of Arts in my university suggested to me that educators may well be in an analogous position to high-tech education that those in the theater in 1916 were to the emerging film industry, and stressed that he meant that with all its ambiguities.

Given that technology has and will continue to have enormous impact on the educational experiences of people, what sorts of philosophical work are important to undertake? Blacker’s answer to this question is implicit in his paper and consists of two parts. Primarily, he provides a categorization scheme which renders apparent the contrasting pulls of substantive and instrumental approaches. In doing this, he makes clear that our thinking about technology and education ought to be able to do justice to the importance of both perspectives without lapsing into either pole, as Blacker asserts that educational theorists writing about technology do. For my own part, I can offer no useful criticism of this, the major part of Blacker’s paper. While it rings true to me, I do not know the field of educational writing on technology sufficiently to judge the fairness of this characterization.

The second part of Blacker’s answer is that we might apply the thoughts of philosophers who have been concerned about technology to educational issues. Particular reference is made to the work of Dewey and Heidegger. It is suggested that they both point to the educational use of technology as an opportunity for “revealing worlds of involvement,” an examination of the commitments underlying our actions. Surely this second avenue is also one worth pursuing, although Blacker would need considerably more space than he has at his disposal to offer a convincing account of how this could provide a comprehensive strategy for “problematizing” technology in education. So, without any intention of criticizing what is explicitly offered by Blacker simply as a hint and an invitation, I will attempt to point out some promising channels and dangerous shoals which lie along this course.¹ In doing so, I will seek a middle course, between specifically educational discourse on technology and abstract inquiry into the nature of technology.

One of the obvious dangers here is to try to treat a complex and highly differentiated set of things as if they could all be assimilated under one sort of model, simply because they are all technological. As Blacker indicates, technologies are often understood as tools, as things like hammers or ballpoint pens which can be picked up, used for a variety of purposes, and put down when we are finished with them. This model reinforces the instrumentalist view that individuals are in control, and that the purposes which guide technologically aided actions are the individuals’. But, this perception of the way things work does not hold when the technologies involved are embedded in large scale systems and practices. When a power company chooses to supply electricity at certain voltages, produced by certain means, along certain routes, the shape of our social lives, as well as our physical/economic well-being may be at stake.

The growth of these technological systems of energy distribution, transportation and communication have caused an enormous realignment of responsibilities and interests, with governments increasingly involved in protecting private, divisible goods, such as profits, to the neglect of public, indivisible goods, such as clean air and water. The more technology can be understood as a set of individuated, small scale objects which just lie there unless put to use by some person, the more plausible an instrumentalist account is. If, however, the range of examples is expanded to include technological systems, including the complex social, economic and material systems required to produce, distribute and maintain individuated pieces of technology, such as cars and computers, the less plausible such an account will become. In this way, we can develop a kind of material, commonsense understanding of the sorts of connections and implications of our hammering along, especially in those cases in which our hammers come with gas tanks, electrical cords or other strings which attach us to systems of technology.

As I have hinted, though not explained, our involvements in technological systems are linked closely to our social relations and our ways of thinking. Technological development, in our time and culture, has tended to be associated with particular kinds of technology. Ursula Franklin, the prominent Canadian metallurgist, has differentiated between prescriptive technologies, in which many people carry out differentiated tasks which together produce a desired product, and holistic technologies, in which a person has control over an entire process. Both may be forms of specialization but in prescriptive technologies, individuals have different roles within the process of producing something whereas in holistic technologies individuals tend to produce a specialized product. Producing a Ford and producing a particular kind of hand-thrown pottery are typical examples of the contrasting ways of organizing tasks.

Because participants in prescriptive technologies lack control over all but their own narrowly defined role in production, they are likely to lack an overall understanding of the work and the standards according to which judgments are made. In some sense, their choices and opportunities for making judgments are supplanted by the planners and designers of systems. For this reason Franklin claims that prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance. In the present context, it is important to examine how such technologies have made their way into educational institutions and practices and whether they might interfere with or frustrate our purposes. Franklin contends that we have become so acculturated to compliance that, to an astonishing degree, educational institutions operate according to a production model appropriate to prescriptive technology but incompatible with the careful nurturing of growth, which she finds a more appropriate metaphor.

I raise this distinction in order to make three points. The first is that we should be suspicious of any theory which treats technology as one thing, or one kind of thing, to be promoted or avoided. Technology is too much with us and too varied in its manifestations to be usefully treated in this manner. Rather, we must learn to ask the right questions, questions which will enable us to make better grounded choices about which technologies to use and how to use them. My second point is that “a technology,” when used broadly to refer to a way of doing things, includes far more than gears and microchips. It also includes ways of thinking and forms of social organization. To opt for certain kinds of technology is to opt for a whole package. Foucault has explored some of these relations in linking the technologies of punishment and discipline with the professions and disciplines they have spawned. The third point is more strictly educational. Is Franklin right that education operates as a prescriptive technology, creating a public which is inclined to accept particular technologies and their related social structures as inevitable?

As a final point, I would like to turn to a particular aspect of the sort of thinking which has been associated with the recent explosive growth of new technology. It has perhaps been best captured by George Grant, who describes it as a technological imperative. It says, “if something is technologically sweet, you do it.” If, when, and how something gets used is a matter for society, politicians, or the courts to decide. For scientists or technicians, the only relevant question is whether it can be done. So, recently a scientist who believes he has isolated a gene which determines homosexuality suggested that he would proceed with his work but do everything in his power to prevent it being used by parents who might selectively abort fetuses which had this gene. The naiveté of this position is breathtaking. Not only does he think he can engage in this sort of work without getting his hands dirty but also that he can choose how others will use his discoveries. We might compare this to the position of Ursula Franklin who throughout her career has refused to work with the aerospace industry because of its link to military applications and has refused to have anything to do with the development of nuclear power. When asked if she would work on the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, she again declined, saying that she would not until there was public agreement to end nuclear power production. Until then, any promising development in terms of handling nuclear waste is likely only to serve as new grounds for continuing nuclear power programs. Here is the germ of an ethics of technology which recognizes that we have choice yet does not imagine that our technologies are simply neutral instruments which can be detached from social context. In closing, I would like to thank David Blacker for raising these issues in a useful way and second him in issuing an invitation for others to join in.

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1. Virtually all these remarks are built on Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1990); and George Grant, “Thinking about Technology” in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anasi, 1986). I would also like to recognize that Shirley Parkinson provided helpful comments on a draft.