PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION:
AN INVITATION TO INQUIRY

David Blacker
Illinois State University

My aim in this brief discussion is to make explicit the ontologies undergirding the various ways in which technology is discussed in a representative sampling of the contemporary critical literature in education, and by doing so to offer an idiom for discussing a set of issues both pressing yet beset by confusion. When I say “critical” I mean to include those discussions with some reflective component, that is, those at least on some level addressing what technology is in its essence and how, in an ethical sense, educators ought to approach it. By doing this I mean to exclude from explicit consideration the vast majority of published work on educational technology, namely, narrow technical discussions of how to use particular devices, as well as those restricted to studying the effects of an educational tool or technique in some setting or other. These technical discussions, by and large, contain no account of technology as such, nor do they offer anything of significant prescriptive import. Like a manufacturer’s guide on how to install and troubleshoot a washing machine, such discussions — quite sensibly, given their purpose — assume as unproblematic the end to which the tool is put while also bracketing the most basic questions about what constitutes a machine for washing (let alone what constitutes a machine), whether or not we ought to engage in washing at all, and what, in the end, is washing itself.

My preliminary claim is that most all theoretical accounts of technology — educational or otherwise — may be characterized as adhering in varying degrees to what I will call a structural ambiguity of common sense. Our common sense intuitions regarding technological phenomena are, as Heidegger would say, “proximally and for the most part” beset with a deep and internal contradiction. This contradiction amounts to an underlying ambiguity because it represents an oscillating ambivalence in our everyday practices and attitudes. On the one hand, we experience tools as things that we use; we regard them as morally neutral in the sense that they seem to await a human purpose to animate them with moral life (for example, a sharp blade may injure me as well as dice my carrots). Someone or other is always at the helm, so it seems, and that person or group of persons decides through some willful act the uses to which the tool is put.

On the other hand, however, is an equally prevalent common sense intuition, especially since the advent in this century of science-based “high-tech.” In our homes, workplaces and even at play, we are awash in a veritable flood tide of tools ever-more refined and complex. As Don Ihde has put it, our lifeworld has become irrevocably “technologically textured.”¹ We may decide which brand or type of telephone to buy, but if we can afford it almost none of us must first determine whether or not to have one at all. It is not up to me personally — or to anyone in particular — whether or not computers are increasingly necessary to mediate everyday human interactions. I become acquainted with the device at work, at home, or in school in order to “keep up.” The other side of the same coin, though, is that technology is perhaps just as commonly regarded as anything-but liberating, as a momentary nuisance or even as a malicious force driven by its own imperatives. We publicly bemoan the “influence” of television on our children, speak of our appliances as “quitting out on us,” and fear losing our jobs to robots and teaching machines. The point is that whether we fear and loath it, look toward it for liberation, or merely “go along” with it and allow it to shape our lives, there is an important sense in which we endow it with a certain agency and act as if it does things in the world, things that we must react to in various ways. Technologies are thus often regarded as the bearers of intentions and are encountered via what Daniel Dennett calls the “intentional stance” (for example, “my car doesn’t want to start,” “the computer won’t let me do that”).²

But all the while we go on using tools and techniques, for it — still, somehow — seems that they are simply at mine or someone’s service. Hence, the relevant intuitions conflict, and until they are sorted out reflectively, our overall attitude is justly characterized as profoundly ambiguous.

Most of the literature on technology and education reflects this underlying ambiguity. To borrow from the schema Albert Borgmann uses to classify theories of technology generally, the relevant educational literature may be classified into two main groups, corresponding to the abovementioned oscillating poles of common sense and the ontologies implicit in them: “substantive” and “instrumental.”³ In the context of contemporary educational research, important distinctions must be made within both categories. These subdivisions are mine, and reflect the basic attitudes taken toward technology in each case, running roughly along (but not reducible to) the lines of “pro” and “anti.”

Substantive theories of technology stem from the common sense intuition that technology is to a great extent an autonomous force, one that shapes us much more than we shape it. It is often called “technological determinism,” in the sense that it is technology itself that does the determining of most, if not all, spheres of human activity.

The most famous and perhaps the most uncompromising proponent of substantivism is the French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul, who regarded la technique as an all-embracing and evil power that has come to enslave all our endeavors, from art and politics to education. The most comprehensive statement of this view in educational theory is provided by C. A. Bowers, who holds that “the technological mindset” — a “unique configuration of thought and social practice that emerged in the West over the last two to three hundred years” — is now so deeply-seated in our culture that it determines most every aspect of contemporary pedagogical practice.⁴ This technological mindset is so pervasive that most every major school reform movement (for example, Marxism, free-schooling, de-schooling, liberal democracy) is haplessly contained within it, doomed merely to advance “its” cause. For Bowers, a radical pedagogy worthy of the name must, somehow, step outside this mindset in order to recover — to even imagine — what, for him, would constitute a truly human vision of education. (The question of how one “steps outside” of a pervasive mindset is unanswered.) A more subtle version of this view derives from the Frankfurt School and describes the root cause of technology’s dominance as a creeping “instrumental reason,” a sub rasa ideology that increasingly dominates all forms of social and personal life by subverting the legitimacy of public discussion concerning the ends of human activity, thereby restricting it to talk about means.⁵

Substantive theories of technology, however, invite a radicalism of a very different sort. This group, which I will call the proponents of a “radical instructional design” (RID) theory, might also with justice be labeled “computer romanticists.” On the whole, these pro-technology substantivists hold that technology is the key to better schools and better education; it can and will break down traditional barriers to effective and successful school reform. If we humbly labor in the vineyard of instructional programming, following wherever innovation leads, we cannot go astray. As one of these high-tech Jeremiads exhorts: “Some can regret the change, but they cannot reverse it; and others…can welcome it and work to fulfill it.”⁶

One of this position’s most savvy proponents, Robert Heinich, articulates a paradigm wherein instructional technology is no longer considered part of education and consequently ought to strike out on its own. The mission of preparing teachers informing the institutional life of colleges of education unduly constrains the RID theorist’s possibilities. Why think, Heinich challenges, that the best we can do is what teachers — even the very best of them — have done? RID theorists should divorce themselves from schools of education and marry themselves to interdisciplinary technology units on campuses everywhere, realizing a paradigmatic and institutional reversal whereby the technologists themselves — unfettered by their erstwhile spouses’ teacher-centered inhibitions — pursue all manner of high-tech pleasures.⁷ The normative core of RID theory, however, is by no means restricted to academia, but is widely represented in the recent round of popular books on educational reform. Armed with the conviction that “[t]echnology is the most purely human of humanity’s features, and it is the driving force of human society,” Lewis Perelman predicts in his book School’s Out that “the nations that stop trying to “reform” their education and training institutions and choose instead to totally replace them with a brand-new, high-tech learning system will be the world’s economic powerhouses through the twenty-first century.”⁸ Mass schooling as we know it will (and should) end in the wake of recent technological innovation. We really have no choice: we either go along and get out front, or we lose our economic competitiveness and decline as a nation.

Neither worshipful nor fearful, the second major category, instrumentalism, builds upon the founding common sense intuition that technologies are merely tools that human beings use in order to achieve the purposes we assign to them. Powerful proof for this is that technologies have always been and are everywhere part of the human story to extend the capacities of given individuals or cultures, for good or ill. The bumpersticker slogan “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” hits the mark. Individual or collective human agency is the locus of all valuation and therefore not the device itself, but its causal ensconcement in a social context is the proper target for inquiry.

In education, instrumentalism may be described as pro-technology when it is relatively sanguine about the beneficial uses to which various technologies can be put. A celebrated exponent of this view is Seymour Papert, developer of the widely-used LOGO computer programming language. In his book Mindstorms and elsewhere, Papert argues that children learning to program in LOGO, can develop “powerful ideas” for problem-solving that can, he contends, transfer to many other areas of life:

I have invented ways to take educational advantage of the opportunities to master the art of deliberately thinking like a computer, according, for example, to the stereotype of a computer program that proceeds in a step-by-step literal, mechanical fashion….What is most important in this is that through these experiences the children would be serving their apprenticeships as epistemologists, that is to say learning to think articulately about thinking.⁹

Pace some of his critics,¹⁰ however, Papert is no substantivist; he does not believe that the pedagogical benefit of LOGO resides in what it does to children, but rather in the kind of control it requires children to take over it. Children should encounter computers in the classroom as “objects to think with,” and he argues explicitly against what he calls “technocentric thinking.”¹¹ One must attend to the culture suffusing the classroom first, and on that basis train teachers to use classroom technologies properly.¹²

Instrumentalism is anti-technology insofar as it considers present usage to be overwhelmingly driven by morally suspect motives; technology is problematic, but only as it is currently employed. Technology’s liberatory potential awaits societal change, usually of fairly major proportions. Most anti-technology instrumentalism in education is Marxist in provenance and takes the form of socio-political critique. Following Andrew Feenberg’s philosophical statement of this general position, it might be called a “critical theory of technology” (CTT).

CTT typically regards all other views of technology as so many smokescreens behind which certain social groups, usually identified as the patriarchy, the capitalists, or some other cultural elite, advance their agendas of domination. A focus on the tools themselves aids in maintaining privilege by deflecting critical scrutiny away from the real motive forces of society, the economy and those who control it.

In educational theory, two more or less distinct levels of CTT may be identified. First-level CTT corresponds to a straightforwardly unreconstructed, Marxist analysis. Although I know of no comprehensive statement of first-level CTT in education, Bowles’s and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America suggests that technology, like schooling, essentially functions as a superstructural variable dependent upon the economic base of society and those who control it. And while these authors claim to allow for a certain amount of dialectical interplay between base and superstructure (as any but the most vulgar Marxist should), they nevertheless counsel unequivocally that technology itself is mostly beside the point: “If meaningful educational reform requires a transformation of production relations, as we believe, we must begin by creating a new social structure, not a new technology.”¹³ One does not liberate today’s oppressive classroom by altering its physical structure, but rather by teaching liberating things for tomorrow’s liberated society. Second-level CTT shares with the Marxist view the contention that at present technology serves elite groups and that the task of a radical pedagogy is to uncover how and why this happens. But it differs markedly by not regarding technology as a neutral tool in the service of hegemonic power; technology is non-neutral in the sense that, as it is currently constituted, it has demonstrably prejudicial effects and, therefore, works to privilege some groups at the expense of others.¹⁴ Elites not only use technology as a club, but use it also to conceal that there is any clubbing going on at all. It provides a perfect weapon — effective yet invisible. And the more value-neutral we regard it, the more invisible it becomes.

Consider ostensibly innocuous notions such as “technological” or “computer literacy.” What harm could come from learning to use computers? As it turns out, a great deal: to take just one example, the aim of educating for high-tech fosters a climate of bogus credentialing providing the ideological cover for the disenfranchisement of certain groups. Yesterday’s reading test for custodians is today’s “computer experience” for all types of employment. Yet, there are ample grounds to challenge, as Douglas Noble has, the idea that on the whole work in a high-tech society requires any substantive notion of “technological literacy” at all.¹⁵ Given the “user-friendly” trajectory of business machines and the deskilling and further fragmentation of labor in the wake of automation (not to mention the unemployment ensuing from global capital’s growing and technologically-based mobility), in the vast majority of cases, working “in contact” with high-tech does not really demand knowing anything much about it. The Burger King cashier indeed “works with” high-tech cash registers, but this hardly entails a higher degree of knowledge about technology. If anything, it demands less. Such examples — and they are legion — add evidence that the drive toward technological literacy seems not to serve any legitimate economic need. Rather, some other agenda, a deep ideological one serving certain identifiable interests, must be driving it. It is not as simple as “change society and technology will follow,” for the latter has become too thoroughly interwoven with the former.

As convincing as second-level CTT may sound, however, and as much as it promises to promote what Maxine Greene once called “wide-awakeness” regarding our technological surroundings, as a pedagogy the theory harbors significant dangers.¹⁶ These have mostly to do with this outlook’s potential for slippage into a more or less indoctrinating stance.¹⁷ Consistently framing one’s role in the classroom as one of unmasking power relations implies that one possesses an unassailable social ontology that one must educate students “up” to. As one liberates in the name of truth, then, one tends also to disable a more open-ended and, in my view, richer pedagogy — one that remains open to differing interpretations, even ones that challenge at the deepest levels. For instance, one must surely allow for the sorts of dialogical interactions described so well by, among others, Nick Burbules and Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon,¹⁸ where entering into a dialogue while presupposing the correct answer tends to limit the experience. At times, social critique is appropriate in the classroom, just as is presupposing the right answer is, but not as an overriding ideal; one may feel oneself to possess the truth about important and pressing matters, but the mere transmission of that truth represents a poor notion of what education can be. As I have tried to indicate, the ontologies implicit in instrumentalism and substantivism locate both on opposite ends of the ambiguous spectrum of our culture’s common sense. And although it belongs to a much larger work to detail the strengths and weaknesses of each position, certain patterns may already be discerned. A proper theory of technology in education ought, I think, to take advantage of both position’s strengths: the substantive conviction that technology can, in a manner of speaking, take on a life of its own, as well as the instrumentalist impulse to contextualize it within the intentions and effects it mediates. But such a theory will also avoid the excesses and lacunae of the two views: the take it or leave it en bloc blackmail of substantivism, and instrumentalism’s blinding zeal to name the one and only force behind it all. A proper theory of technology in education, then, must incorporate the strengths while avoiding their corrupted counterparts.

Space permits only a hint at the contours of such a theory. As I have argued at length elsewhere,¹⁹ some clues are supplied in the thought of Dewey and early Heidegger. One of the most peculiar properties of technology, both thinkers hold, is that insofar as a tool really functions as a tool, it, in a manner of speaking, hides itself in its function, or as Heidegger puts it, it “withdraws” from proximal view. Dewey writes:

A tool is a particular thing, but it is more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied. It possesses an objective relation as its own defining property. Its perception as well as its actual use takes the mind to other things.²⁰

Heidegger’s celebrated existential analysis of hammering illustrates this point well. As I hammer-along in order to, say, build my daughter a dollhouse, my project is given significance by the end in view, namely, the dollhouse, making my daughter happy, saving some money by not having to purchase one, and so on. In a sense, I am lost for a time in a miniature world of functional relations, the relays being connected via these “in-order-to’s.”²¹

For present purposes, the point is that the materiality of the hammer recedes from view in all of this, but only to reveal a dynamic world of meaningful involvements, ever expanding and contracting. I strive to make my daughter happy because being a father demands it, as does my place within the family. Perhaps, as I hammer-along building the dollhouse I am driven by guilt for having forgotten her birthday last week, or by fear that my wife may castigate me for not attending to the child more often. Ultimately, according to Heidegger, if a resolute questioning pursues these in-order-to’s far enough, they lead to a deeper understanding of one’s own nature as a finite being, and they highlight what one cares most deeply for. In Heidegger’s language, such radical questioning fore-grounds one’s “ownmost possibilities for Being.”²² However far down this road I may travel, though, the activity of hammering-along (or whatever I do, from arranging the furniture to contemplating my own death) is necessarily ensconced in a web of involvements whose significance is limited only by my capacity, perhaps my courage, for self-reflection.

Technologies, then, in this case even simple ones, if they are encountered in the proper way, can catalyze self-understanding unto unforeseen depths — even as they simultaneously conceal from view significant aspects of one’s environing world. This double aspect of technology — both concealing and revealing — is the rock of insight upon which to build not only descriptions of technology in education, but also the beginnings of a normative theory that decisively links technology with educational experience. If one grants that education, as opposed to training, indoctrination and the like, has much more to do with revealing worlds of involvement than it does with closing them off, one may generate an imperative for educators to orient themselves toward technology such that the latter are allowed to reveal worlds in as open-ended a manner as possible. The substantive conviction that technology is, in a way, telic, thereby unites with the instrumentalist caveat that looking at the tool itself at the expense of its contextuality is misguided.

As philosophers, we can help to provide a more compelling vocabulary for faulting, say, a curriculum too laden with software tutorial programs on the grounds that, while they may well effectively disclose how to accomplish certain tasks, the overall effect may be to shut out much, much more — largely by concealing the pre-determined pathways along which such programs must run. One may learn to factor quadratic equations like a pro while also “learning” that education itself is accumulating information, has end-points, and is generally something to be gotten over with.²³ What is wrong here is not the learning of useful information per se, but that one’s ability to initiate learning in wider and alien contexts withers away; no sum of microworlds can match the dynamic, ever-expanding and edifying capacity to go on revealing one’s own lifeworld. Technological devices are not foes here but they do constitute problems. Our task as educators is to make them into enabling ones.

For a response to this essay, see Selman.

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1. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 1.

2. Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 13-34, 49-53, 69-80. Dennett contrasts the intentional stance with the “design stance” and the “physical stance.” In the former, we approach, say, a stereo receiver with some knowledge of how it is supposed to work (for example, “the volume dial is broken”) whereas the latter stance requires the sort of knowledge a engineer — or even a physicist — might be expected to have about the device’s internal workings perhaps extending to the level of the sub-atomic particles constituting it.

3. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 9-12. There is a third category, “pluralist,” a stance that, by and large, eschews ontological commitments that I have chosen to leave out for simplicity’s sake.

4. C. A. Bowers, “The Reproduction of Technological Consciousness: Locating the Ideological Foundations of a Radical Pedagogy,” Teachers College Record 83, no. 4 (1982): 530. This view is spelled out further in Bowers’s recent book, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).

5. See Robert Broughton, “The Surrender of Control: Computer Literacy as Political Socialization of the Child,” in The Computer in Education: A Critical Perspective, ed. Douglas Sloan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1985), 102. The classic antecedent of this general position is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1944): “A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself (121).” The idea, as it is further developed by Herbert Marcuse and later in more nuanced form in Jürgen Habermas’s earlier writings, is that technology has become a distinctive ideology and thereby a motive force in social life. As such it must be countered by a non-instrumental form of human interaction, “communicative action.” See Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 50ff.

6. Robert O. McClintock, “Introduction: Marking the Second Frontier,” in Computing and Education: The Second Frontier, ed. Robert O. McClintock (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), xiii.

7. See Robert Heinich, “The Proper Study of Instructional Technology,” Education Communication and Technology Journal 32, no. 2 (Summer 1984); and “Instructional Technology and the Structure of Education,” Education Communication and Technology Journal, 33 no. 1 (Spring 1985). For an overview, see William Winn, “Toward a Rationale and a Theoretical Basis for Educational Technology,” Educational Technology Research and Development 37, no. 1 (1989).

8. Lewis J. Perelman, School’s Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 25, 20.

9. Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 27.

10. See, for example, John Davy, “Mindstorms in the Lamplight,” in The Computer in Education: A Critical Perspective, ed. Douglas Sloan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1985), 11-20. Davy argues, rather implausibly — and obscurely — in my view, that Papert’s book is “servile…to technocracy and easily alienated from the fullness of human experience (15).”

11. See Seymour Papert, “Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking,” Educational Researcher 16, no. 1 (January-February 1987): 23ff.; and George Franz and Seymour Papert, “Computers as Materials: Messing about with Time,” in The Computer in Education, 65.

12. See Gwen Solomon, “The Computer as Electronic Doorway: Technology and the Promise of Empowerment,” Phi Delta Kappan (December 1992).

13. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 69. Among philosophers of education, Richard LaBrecque has articulated a position along similar lines, holding that “technological innovation is driven by interests and values that exist outside technology itself, “and therefore we ought to focus on those who call the shots, not on the tools themselves. “Capitalism, Technology and Education,” Philosophy of Education 1987 (Normal, Ill.: Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society, 1987), 351.

14. These “groups,” it should be added, may well include constituted via patriarchy as well. One feminist critic has provided an especially lucid statement of level-two CTT: the “model that represents technology itself as neutral, and asserts that it is the human application of technology that determines whether it has beneficial or destructive effects, does not go far enough. By contrast, the social shaping approach insists that technology is always a form of social knowledge, practices and products. It is the result of conflicts and compromises, the outcomes of which depend primarily on the distribution of power and resources between different groups in society.” From Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 162.

15. See Douglas Noble “Computer Literacy and Ideology,” Teachers College Record 85, no. 4 (Summer 1984).

16. See Maxine Greene, “An Approach to the Constitution of Democracy,” Theory Into Practice 25, no. 1 (1976): 22.

17. Peter Carbone noticed this in his reply to LaBrecque (see note 13), “Taming the Technological Tiger: Reply to LaBrecque, Philosophy of Education 1987, 358.

18. Nicholas C. Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993); Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, Turning the Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

19. See my “Allowing Educational Technologies to Reveal: A Deweyan Perspective,” Educational Theory 43, no. 2 (Spring 1993); and “On the Alleged Neutrality of Technology: A Study in Dewey’s Experience and Nature,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy (Winter 1994, forthcoming).

20. John Dewey, “Experience and Nature,” in The Later Works, vol. 1 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 101.

21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 116f.

22. Ibid., 434.

23. For a fuller critique along these lines, see Michael Streibel, “A Critical Analysis of the Use of Computers in Education,” Educational Communication and Technology Journal 34, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 137-61.