Getting a Purchase on "The School of Tomorrow" and its Constituent Commodities: Histories and...

Getting a Purchase on “The School of Tomorrow” and its Constituent Commodities: Histories and Historiographies of Technologies

Stephen Petrina

“The School of Tomorrow,” as envisioned by psychologists Otis Caldwell and Stuart Courtis in 1924, “will pay far more attention to individuals than the schools of the past. Each child will be studied and measured repeated- ly from many angles, both as a basis of prescriptions for treatment and as a means of controlling development. The new education will be scientific in that it will rest on a fact basis. All development of knowledge and shll will be individualized, and classroom practice and recitation as they exist today in conventional schools will largely disappear.”’ “The School of Tomorrow,” would use mechanical equipment, radios, and movies to reveal a world beyond the limits of books and recitations. Textbooks would be constructed for individual success and to underwrite a program of self-reha- bilitation. Psychologists, through “experiments in laboratories and in schools of education” would discover “what everyone should know and the best way to learn essential elements.” In the surveillant spaces of “The School of Tomorrow,” hygienically regulated students would learn essential items under “psychologically right conditions.”? John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of Tomowow (1 91 5) can be read similarly, where psychology and apparatus of individualization underwrite the new pedagogy. Hybrids of buildings, machines, media, and psychologies in a popularized, “modern” culture, promised distinction, excitement, health, hygiene, leisure, and prosperity.

Dr. Stephen Petrina is Associate Professor of Technology Studies Education in the Curricu- lum Studies depamnent at the University of British Columbia. He has written on the cultural constraints of teaching and learning about technology, and is currently researching the historical interrelationships between educational, medical, and psychological cultures.

‘Otis W. Caldwell and Stuart A. Courtis, Then and Now in Education, 1845: 1923 (New York: Appleton, 1924), 155; See also H.R. Gray, ‘‘Improved Learning Aids and Future Edu- cational Reorganization,” Teachers College Record 43 (May 1936): 599-602; Howard McClusky, “Mechanical Aids to Education and the New Teacher-A Prophecy,” Education 55 (October 1934): 83-88; “Professor Reynolds Holds That Modem School Fits Pupils for Machine Age,” Teachers College Record 32 (May 1930): 649-651.

?Joy Elmer Morgan, “The School of Tomorrow,”Journal of the National Education Asso- ciation 18 (January 1929): 1; John Dewey & Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: Dutton, 1915).

76 History of Education Quarterly

Psychologist Sidney Pressey, eventually crowned “grandfather” of teaching machines and computer-assisted instruction, clearly articulated this sentiment for nearly five decades. With regard to schools, said Pressey in 1930: “The guess is hazarded, that within the next twenty years, special mechanical aids will make mass psychological experimentation a common place and bring about in education something analogous to the Industrial Revolution.” There were some obstacles, he noted: “Foremost is to be put the intellectual inertia and conservatism of educators who regard such ideas as frealush or absurd, or rant about the mechanization of education when the real purpose of such a development is to free teachers from mechanical tasks. Next is the financial and technological development of such devices in such form and a t such expense as may permit practical use. Least problem-finding ingenious psychologists who invent such mechanisms; there are now many workers in the field, and fascinating developments may be expected soon.”3 Pressey and his contemporaries envisioned a modern, hybrid design for education. Customary controls and relations would give way to a new liberty inscribed in the new education and psychology. Psy- chologists would play a leading role in reshaping classroom architecture, apparatus, and relations. Students and teachers would be regulated to the routine use of new procedures, products, and spaces. Through this regulation, teaching and learning would be automated and individualized and therapeutics tailored to individual capacities and interests. Surveillance would be decentralized through new apparatus. The school would no longer be equipped for storing the mind with facts but would instead be designed for self-improvement and remediation toward a healthy, active performance of the duties of life. The new flooring would aid in concentration; new desks would lengthen attention spans, and heating and ventilating systems would maintain high rates of attendance; and nutritional lunches would found clear thinking. Indeed, Pressey anticipated that schools would be hybrids of commodities that were automated, hygienic, individualized, programmed, and psychotherapeutic.

It is no exaggeration to say that visions of tomorrow were made manifest, although not in the way anticipated by Pressey. School buildings and rooms are architecturally shaped through modern notions of hygienic and psychotherapeutic supervision. Examination apparatus, which embody specific disciplinary and psychological programs, shape nearly each and every step of teaching and learning processes. Each child is “measured repeated- ly from many angles” and regulated to the use of computers, tests, textbooks, workbooks, and other commodities. Technologies of drilling, reading,

’[Sidney L. Pressey], “First Results With, and Problems in the Development of, Appa- ratus for Testing and Automatic Experimentation in Learning,’’ [Summer 19301, p. 2 , File 2 1, Box 4 , Sidney L. Pressey Papers, The Ohio State University Archives.

Histories and Historiographies of Technologies 77

and testing tell teachers what therapeutic treatments are necessary for individual students and how much of the remedial treatment to administer. New classes of specialists-such as clinical and educational hygenists, psychologists, sociologsts, and technologists were organized to assess, design, and market the apparatus and spaces.

But of course, the “School of Tomorrow” looks much the same-ideologically and spatially-at the turn of this new century as it did at the turn of the last. The rhetoric of progress that accompanied the Apple Comput- er Inc.’s “Classrooms of Tomorrow” in the late 1990s was primarily about commodities and psychologies similar to those in the 1920s. Technology’s “catalytic impact,” Apple’s advocates envisioned, would make classrooms of the twenty-first century “fundamentally different” from earlier classrooms. The United States National Aeronautics and Space Agency’s “Class- room of the Future” was accompanied by a similar discourse, which has remained integral to arguments of contemporary advocates and critics of educational commodities. In the “School of Tomorrow,” recently declared England’s Secretary of State for Education and Employment, “there will be virtual libraries used by pupils working on laptop computers, and teachers could be trained in teacher training centers whch exist only in ~yberspace.”~ These visions of tomorrow are icons in popular culture as well.

Like corporate visions, popular discourse typically offers no more than what Douglas Noble calls a “gee whiz glance at the marvels of the future.” Issues like whether computers can assist teachers or will motivate children and revolutionize schooling shape public policy. Combine a cultural hope in medicine, science, and technology with a campaign of promotional rhetoric and uncritical media coverage and you have a belief that by merging computers with tests, we have found the “educational equiva- lents of [the] polio vaccine and penicillin.”’ Certainly, the issue of technology in education has been confined to a small dimension in space and time, and accompanymg discourse has been conventionally, if not conve- niently, kept ahistorical.

‘David D y e r , “Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow: What We’ve Learned,” Educational Leadenhip 5 1 (April 1994): 9. See also Marvin Cetron, Schools of the Future (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1991), 1-35; Alexander J. Stoddard, Schoolsfor Tomorrov (New York: The Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1957); Patrick Suppes, “The School of the Future: Technologi- cal Possibilities,” in The Future ofEducution ed. Louis Rubin (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1975), 146-157; Alvin Toffler ed., Learningfor Tmorrov (New York: Random House, 1974); David Blunkett quoted in Vivek Chaudhary, “Rich Piclungs for Computer Firms in Virtual Class- rooms,” The Guardian, 17 January 1998, p. 4. In the 199Os, much of CAI rhetoric was similar, if not identical, to Pressey’s of the 1930s. “There’s a revolution going on,” Lewis Perleman wrote in 1990, “teachers must now decide what role they will play, vanguard, victim, leader, or Luddite.” Quoted in Michael Schrage, “Nintendo Educators Miss the Real Mission of the Schools,” The Washington Pan, 14 December 1990, p. F3.

’Douglas Noble, “The Underside of Computer Literacy,” Rarrtan 3 (Winter 1984): 5 7 ; Cover quotes John T. Bruer, “The Mind’s Journey From Novice to Expert,” American Educator 17 (Summer 1993): 8.


Critics of current interests in the commodification of education have countered with sobering thoughts on the rise of rational thinlung, threats to class mobility, disability, gender and racial equity, labor, liberty, and unforeseen problems.6 Their critiques are often patterned upon the work of curriculum historians and theorists who pit the rise of social control and technology against the decline of humanities and liberal arts. But critics are a t a loss to draw from histories of a wide range of technologies-architecture, desks, curriculum, media, offices, programmed instruction, tests, and textbooks at the same time. Sociologists of education have framed a political economy of texts in education, but with a fairly narrow historical perspective.’ Similarly, economic sociologists are concerned with specific “resource inputs,” but this work is marked by an over-reliance on production function models which fail to adequately account for the histories and politics of commodities and consumption.8 If this ahistorical discourse on educational commodities is not by choice, then it may be a reflection of inadequate historiography.

6For example, Michael Apple, “The New Technology: Is It Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?,” Computers in the Schools 8 (September 1991): 59-81; C.A. Bowers, The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-neutrality of Technology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988); Hank Bromley and Michael Apple, eds., Educa- tion/Technology/Pover: Educational Computing as Social Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Hank Bromley, ed., “Special Issue: Social Power and Practices of Science and Technology Within Education,” Educational Policy 12 (September 1998); Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell, “New Technologies and the Cultural Ecology of Primary School- ing: Imagining Teachers as Luddites IdDeed,” Educational Policy 12 (September 1998): 542- 567; Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell, “Learning to Make a Difference: Gender, New Technologies and Inmquity,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3 (Spring 1996): 119-135; David Cohen, “Educational Technology, Policy and Practice,” Education Evaluation and Policy Anal- ysis 9 (Summer 1987): 153-1 70; Suzanne Damarin, “Unthinking Educational Technology: A Feminist Perspective,” Holistic Education Review 7 (Spring 1994): 50-57;John Beynon & Hughie Mackay, eds., TechnobgiLalLitmacy and the Crim’mlum (New York: Falnier Press, 1992); Hughie Mackay, Michael Young &John Beynon, eds., Understanding Technology in Education (New York: Falmer Press, 1991); Neil Postman, “Virtual Students, Digital Classroom,” The Nation, 9 October 1995, p. 377-382; Leonard Waks, “The New World of Technology in U.S. Edu- cation: A Case Study in Policy Formation and Succession,” Technology in Sociev 13 (Winter

‘Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Edzuation (New York: Routledge, 1986); Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith, eds. The Politics of the Textbook (New York: Routledge, 1991); Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke and Carmen Luke, Language, Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook (New York: Falmer Press, 1989); David Elliott and Arthur Woodward, eds., Textbooks and Schooling in the United States, 89th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, part I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Allan Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology: Post- war Literacy Inmution and the Mythology of Dick andjane (New York: Falmer Press, 1988); Special issue “Embattled Books: The State of the Text,”Journal of Educational Thought 24 (December 1990).

XRebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben, “Instruction in Classrooms,” in Review of Research in Education ed., Lee Shulman (Ithaca, IL: F.E. Peacock Publishing Company, 1977), 89-156; idem., How Schools Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Gary Burtless, ed., Does Money Matter? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996).

1991): 233-253.


This essay moves from histories of school architecture and classroom systems--from “outside” to “inside” schools-and through histories of educational commodities in a general order of tests, textbooks, media, programmed curriculum, teaching machines, and computers.’ If the “School of Tomorrow” is fundamentally a contingent hybrid, as Michel Foucault argued, then perhaps a collective reading of histories can help us overcome a practice of isolating some technologies for analysis while arbitrarily ignor- ing others. By combining histories of a variety of commodities, examinations with textbooks for instance, I am suggesting that education is a process whereby apparently ordinary agents are rearticulated with each other in peculiar hybrids. With these histories, 1 articulate the stories of two psychologists who ventured to contrive commodities for classrooms in the United States from the late 1910s to the 1950~.~” A Foucauldian subtext to this essay is that “it is not educational principles that are central to the role of educational systems but [rather] school premises.”” With new hybrid forms virtually simulating the “School of Tomorrow” under very real, social conditions today, what stories ought historians tell about schools?

Tommercialization, commodification, and commoditization have been used somewhat interchangeably by contemporary analysts of education. For David Noble, commercialization refers to the larger process of aligning education with business and industry while commoditization refers to the process of transforming instructional practice into material and symbolic forms (i.e., courses become courseware). Commodification typically refers to the reduction of education, knowledge, or work to economic circulation and market processes. For this essay, commodities will generally be those technologies (architectural, administrative and instructional) that order and shape educational practice. Commodification will refer to the larger process of the production, consumption and regulation of these techniques and spaces and their symbolic capital. On these issues, see David Noble, “Digital Diploma Mills: T h e Automation of Higher Education,” [Electronic document, 19971, Available from http://www~oumet.com/rwii/deplomamills. html; Wesley Shumar, College for Sale: A Critique of the Commodtjcation of Highel- Education (Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press, 1997). I will deal with K-12 classrooms, acknowledging the differences involved in the commodification of post- secondary education in North America. 1 will nor review histories of classrooms and technologies installed for the middle and working classes, such as art rooms, kitchens, musical instruments, pottery wheels, science apparatus, shops, stoves, table saws, and typewriters. While I acknowledge the trend toward disciplinary technologies in curriculum, I will not review histories of bureaucracies and disciplines per se.

‘“Stephen Petrina, “‘The Never-To-Be-Forgotten Investigation’: Luella Cole, Sidney Pressey and Mental Surveymg in Indiana, 1917-192 1,” History ofPsychology 4 (August, 2001): 245-271; idem., “From Intelligence Testing Machine to ‘Automatic Teacher’: Sidney Pressey and the Failure to Automate Education and Commercialize of Psychology, 1924-1934,” Terh- nology and Culture (forthcoming); idem., Luella Cole, Sidney Pressey and the Construction of Educational Psychology at The Ohio State University, 192 1-1932,” Hb~ory ofPsychology (forthcoming); idem., “Medicalizing Liberty in the ‘Kingdom of Evils’: Education, Medicine, Psy- chology, Foucault” (unpublished manuscript, 2001).

“Ian Hunter, “Assembling the School,” in Foucault and Political Reason eds. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne & Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996), 147.


Schools of Politics: Architecture, Buildings, and Premises

As anthropologst of technoscience Bruno Latour has written, “institution” and “profession” have little explanatory power for historians. “From fire stations to schools” says Latour, “everything looks approximately the same, with the same differentiation of function, the same sort of invention of new partitions, new accounting rules, new panoptica .... Every single discipline is doing the same in the nineteenth century: getting a profession, institutions and buildings.”Iz These are general features of the nineteenth century and it is difficult to argue with Latour on this. For a good example of this indistinction during the late 1800s, hospitals-medical and psychopathic-looked like the city ward schools and grammar schools and func- tioned the same in many ways.

The new city and consolidated rural county schools for white students were modeled from hospital building plans and comprised “all modern improvements in sanitary plumbing, heating and ventilation, but architectural effect [of hospitals] as well.”13 No longer would these schools be architecturally or ideologically modeled from the home, chapel, facto- ry, or warehouse. Embedded within the fixtures, walls, and spaces of the new schools was a hygienic knowledge of comfort and disease and a particular ideology of character, discipline, morality, sanity, and vanity. Arti- facts in modern schools were shaped through notions of bacteriology, as much as through conventional notions of the civil and pious self and society. The building acts and codes established during the late 1800s and early 1900s standardized and regulated these artifacts, ensuring that schools, furniture, and apparatus would look the same. Whereas school masters’s and mistress’s regulations continued to govern the schoolhouse relations between students and interior artifacts, architectural design circumscribed scientific, private duties toward health to reinforce these regulations. These changes in code regulated a middle- and upper-class habit and logic of liberty from early days of public schooling. But now, that neglected actor in education history, the janitor, became as important a defender of freedom, morality, and sanity as the administrator and teacher.” “He” was at the same time

”Bruno Latour, “The Costly Ghostly Kitchen,” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine eds. Andrew Cunningham & Perry Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),

I3Gilbert B. Morrison, “School Architecture and HyFene,” in Monographs on Educa- tion in the United States ed. Nicholas Murray Butler (New York: Am0 Press, 1969), 430.

“May Ayres, Jesse Williams and Thomas Wood, Healtbfil Schoob (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 191 8); Henry Bernard, School Architecture (New York: Teachers College Press, 1848/1970); Severance Burrage and Henry T. Baily, School Sanitation and Decoration (New York: D. C. Heath Company 1899); John Duffy, The Sanitarians A History ofAmerican Pub- lic Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 175220; John Duffy, “School Build- ings and the Health ofAmerican School Children in the Nineteenth Century,” in Healing and History ed. Charles Rosenberg (New York: Dawson, 1979); Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The

295-296.

Histories and Historioraphies of Technologies 81

Fig. 1. Reprinted with permission from the American School Board Journal (August). Copyright (1929), the National School Boards Association. All rights reserved.

“in charge of millions of dollars worth of property and in charge of what is far more precious, the general physical and moral welfare of thousands of children.”” Indeed, hybrids of buildings, interiors, and their custodians have politics and power (See Figure 1.) However, it is one thing to suggest this and another to persuasively demonstrate the agency of artifacts and spaces.

American Pursuit of C1eanlines.r (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87-149; W. Kdham, “The Hygienic Construction of Schoolhouses from an Architect’s Standpoint,” Fourth Inter- national Congress on School Hygiene Transactions, volume I1 (1914): 35-38; Roy Lowe, “The Medical Profession and School Design in England, 1902-1914,” Pedagogica Historica 8 (1973): 425-444; Grant Rodwell, “Australian Open-An School Architecture,” History of Education Review 24 (Fall 1995): 2 1-41; Nancy Tomes, Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and American Lifp (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Nancy Tomes, “The Private Side of Public Health: Sanitary Science, Domestic Hygene, and Germ Theory, 1870-1900,” Bulletin ofthe History ofMedicine 64 (Winter 1990): 509-539.

“Philip Lovejoy, “Securing Efficient Janitorial Service,” The Nation’s Schools 3 aanuary 1929): 17.


Thomas Markus’s Buildings and Power is a persuasive argument for this link. Taking cues from Foucault, Markus analyzed a range of seven- teenth- and eighteenth-century archtectural spaces, from hospitals, libraries, mills, prisons, schoolhouses, and theaters to workhouses. Through a case study of spatial features and furniture, Markus topographically showed how social relations were materialized in monitorial schools during the early 1800s. He demonstrated how the spatial designs of schoolrooms were invest- ed with disciplinary power. “Space” he wrote, “became a sign for two kmds of structure: competitive, resulting from a place-capturing within classes or drafts, and from separation of classes based on achievement into rows, blocks, or rooms, and organizational as in Bell’s ‘ailes’ and in the grouping of Lancaster’s ‘drafts’ in semi-circles and in desks with a monitor’s stool at the end of each. In both power flowed along the deep, tree-like hierarchy: master, head monitor, monitors, assistant monitors and children.” Where the schoolroom was a space for structuring competition under central, direct control, the playground was to foster cooperation under “discreet surveillance.” The playground was, perhaps for its creators, a space for fostering behavior under free-market conditions where cooperation would become a “strategy for sur~iva l .~”~ Monitorial schools were established in Philadel- phia and New York during the late 1810s and similar types of school plans were popularized during the 1830s and 1840s.

According to William W. Cutler, 111, school designs from the mid 1800s reflected interests in small groups by reducing the size of monitorial classrooms and increasing their numbers.’: Henry Barnard’s School Archi- tecture, first published as articles during the late 1830s, popularized the American architectural and furniture designs that structured these modern schools. By the early 1900s a new professional, the school architect, was comfortably established in the United States, reflecting an increasing specialization in social practice. Cutler provided a sweeping survey-and this is a liability-ofAmerican school architecture from the 1830s through the 1920s. During this time, state-sponsored schools became, Cutler argued, facades, icons, and monuments to a republican ideology and virtue. Appear- ance would be a cue for class oppression and racism.

Deborah Weiner demonstrated in Architecture and Social Refomz in Late- Victorian England how crucial architectural style was to signifylng the new commitment of England to the education of worlung-class children

I6Thomas Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Budding Types (New York: Routledge, 1993), 93-94; idem., “Early Nineteenth Century School Space,” Pedagogica Historica 32 (February 1996): 1-50; Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 9-10,72-75.

17William W. Cutler, 111, “Cathedral of Culture: The Schoolhouse in American Edu- cational Thought and Practice Since 1820,” History ofEdzlcation Quarterly 29 (Spring 1989): 1-40.


following the passage of the Education Act in 1870. Outside, the new Board Schools took on a Queen Anne revival style to reflect their middle-class origins. Inside, the schools were without ornament, and monitorial in design, embodying what had become a traditional English system of discipline. Board Schools designed in the 1880s by Edward Robson included the exte- rior facade, but by this time the interiors were based on the Prussian system of smaller, separate classrooms. Persuaded by the England School Board to adopt Prussian designs, Robson admitted the interiors were “~n-English~~ and inappropriate for worlung-class children. Nonetheless, while the older schools segregated sexes for monitorial discipline, the new schools provided spaces for explicitly gendered training for domestic and waged labor. For Weiner, an “architectural vocabulary” for each of the nearly 500 Board Schools structured a discourse on English working-class education.18

Coincidental with the increasing economic investments in social institutions, such as education and medicine during most of the first half of the twentieth century in England and North America, a new professional class of architects had developed. In his study of modern archtectural form, Rho- dri Windsor-Liscombe demonstrated the centrality of those architects to educational form. In post-World War I1 British Columbia, the architect R. A. D. Benvick epitomized the architectural visionaries of the modern school. Benvick was positioned as not only a designer of built form and modernity, but also as a social legislator-a planner of political and social form. The schools constructed by Benvick and other modern architects regulated students to hygienic, modern form. For these architects, their schools were intended to inspire preferences and tastes for a modern style of social environment. “Tomorrow’s Schools,” wrote Benvick’s contemporary in Ontario, will be stripped of all facades to provide for a well- planned, functional sociali~ation.’~

Studies of architecture and schooling have begun to provide a sense of how buildings, interior spaces, furniture, and politics are articulated with each other. Upon opening a school door, entering a classroom or office, and closing the door, one does not recede from politics to practice. The challenge for anthropologists, historians, and sociologists of education is to demonstrate the arbitrariness of inside-outside divisions. An abundance of literature exists on the topics of classroom processes and cultural repro-

“Deborah Weiner, Architecture and Social R e f m in LateeVictorian England (Manch- ester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 148; See also Edward R. Robson, School Architec- mre (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1874). On these themes, see Malcolm Vick, “Building Schools, Building Society: Accommodating Schools in Mid-Nineteenth Century Australia,” Historical Studies in Education 5 (Fall 1993): 231-250.

IPF&odri Windsor-Liscombe, “Schools for a ‘Brave New World’: R.A.D. Benvick and School Design in Postwar British Columbia,” BC Studies 90 (Summer 1991): 25-39; John B. Parkin, “Tomorrow’s Schools,” Rqyal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal 20 Uuly 1943): 99-114.


duction, but this work by and large fails to adequately account for classroom commodities. In the economics and sociology of education, technology is treated as an “effect” or resource input into the instructional process.2o Hence, in sociological descriptions of “how schools work,” most technologies are “black boxed” and left as certain and unproblematic.*’ Tests and textbooks have been treated somewhat differently, and a few authors have ventured to articulate commodities with politics in classrooms and offices. The first step is opening classroom and office doors in the “School of Tomorrow” and paying attention to the politics of practice.

Classrooms of Power: Processes and Systems

Classroom-level research has been a pressing concern for historians of education, and only over the past two decades were classrooms serious subjects. Barbara Finkelstein’s Governing the Young provided a detailed glimpse into the history of teachers’ work and classroom processes in the United States. For Finkelstein, teachers assumed a complex of classroom roles over the nineteenth century as schools became “freighted with new material, political, symbolic, and social possibilities .... Both the schools and the teachers within them would mirror, link, and mediate between the increasingly differentiated worlds of public and private space, large and small tradition, macro and micro As she pointed out twenty years after this work was written, she did not demonstrate how classroom processes were contingent on cultural politics. We are left wondering how hybrids of curriculum, ideology, material culture, students, and teachers were animated. While Finkelstein focused on classroom practice, David Hogan managed to keep open the classroom door to show how economic structures are animated in classrooms.

For Hogan, classrooms are institutional and technical hybrids shaped over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through class formation, disciplinary power, “ideologcal structuration,” and economic markets?3 In a 1989 essay, “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power,”

lQFor example, Barr and Dreeben, Hov Schools Work; Burtless, Does Money Matter?; Ian Westbury, “Research into Classroom Processes: A Review of Ten Years’ Work,” Journal of Curriczllum Studies 4 (October 1978): 283-308.

“On black-boxing, see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and En#- neers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1-17; Nathan Rosenberg, Exploring the Bkzck-Box: Economics, Technology and History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

“Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popuhr Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Falmer Press, 1990), 10; On history of classrooms, see idem., “Education Historians as Mythmakers,” in Review of Research in Education 18 ed. Gerald Grant (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1992), 275, 286.

”David Hogan, “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System,’’ Histmy of Education Quarterly 29 (Fall


Hogan argued that the material organization, psychology, and social relations of contemporary classrooms are interdependent and linked to market and disciplinary revolutions. Lancaster’s hybrid system of classroom innovations was, for education, an influential expression of these revolutions. Through his social psychology, he employed a number of technologies: examinations, disciplines of knowledge, nieritocratic ladders supported by systems of competition, rule, reward and punishment, seating arrange- ments, time schedules, and ubiquitous surveillance. According to Hogan, Lancaster unwittingly conceptualized the classroom as a competitive market permeated with disciplinary power. Only to a small degree does Hogan manage to demonstrate how Lancaster’s “rationalized” system was assembled through its constituent agents. Hogan’s focus was on the entire hybrid. In “Examinations, Merit, and Morals” he helped us to understand how individual technologies of a monitorial system articulate with one another. Hogan’s work is instructive in articulating ideology in practice, but there is an asymmetry in his renderings of monitorial classrooms, as artifacts are not granted the same agency as head monitor, class monitors, and students. Regardless, when we combine Hogan’s with Markus’s work, we can begin to see how market forces, material culture, and the monitorial system defined liberty through discipline.*’

David Hamilton has linked changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century education to the incipient marketplace and implicitly to disciplinary power. Through the 1830s in England, group-based, classroom pedago- gies gradually displaced individualized modes of learning and teaching. Hamilton argued that “taken independently, neither technology (material resources), nor beliefs (ideological resources) are sufficient to account for the practices of schooling.”” Slipping from this reasonable thesis, Hamil- ton proceeded to focus on ideologies (e.g., market capitalism) and ideo- logues (e.g., Adam Smith). As group-based instruction formed, he noted, an “architectural unit, the classroom came to prominence ...( lessons, subjects, timetables, grading, standardization, streaming).” This hybrid was

1989): 381-417; idem., “Examinations, Merit, and Morals: The Market Revolution and Dis- ciplinary Power in Philadelphia’s Public Schools, 1838-1 868,” Historical Studies in Educatiou 4 (Spring 1992): 3 1-78; idem., “The Organization of Schooling and Organizational Theory: The Classroom System in Public Education in Philadelphia, 1818-1918,” in Research in Soci- oloev ofEducation and Socialization ed. Ronald Convin (Greenwich, CT: TAI Press, 1990), 241- 297 i n 278.

?‘See also Keith Hoskin. “The Examination. Discidinam Power and Rational School- ing,” History of Education 8 (Summer 1979): 135-146; Karen jones and Kevin Williamson, “The Birth of the Schoolroom,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (Autumn 1979): 59-109; Alan Kazdin and Joan Pulaski, “Joseph Lancaster and Behavior Modification in Education,”Jour- nalof the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (June 1977): 261-266.

?’David Hamilton, “Adam Smith and the Moral Economy of the Classroom System” Journal of Curriculum Studies 12 (October 1980): 282; David Hamilton, Towards a Theory of Schooling (New York: Falmer Press, 1989).


governed by a “moral economy,” or basically the consolidation and employment of market relations. Hamilton’s “classroom system” and Hogan’s “rationalization of pedagogy” are one in the same hybrid.

As these historians help us understand the conditions that made particular discursive practices of schooling possible during the nineteenth century, they have reiterated the importance of paying close attention to how classroom commodities are articulated within hybrids. Hogan’s work pro- vides a sophisticated, theoretical dimension to understanding the articula- tion between test apparatus and classroom systems and between oral examinations of early nineteenth-century schools and written tests of mid to late nineteenth-century schools. And this apparatus-the “test”-has received an extraordinary amount of attention in the history and sociology of education.

Administrating Commodities in Cluswooms and W c s : Tests

Historiographically, we have a sense of how ideology articulated with testing practices during the past century, but details are lost on an abundance of over-generalized and under-historicized histories. Through the 1960s and 1970s, a critical, “revisionist” discourse developed, articulating the process of testing with corporate capital and philanthropic investment.” This discourse continued in the 1980s following three decades of huge investments in testing and amidst a revival of a conservative social agenda.*? Over this past decade, some detailed case studies have appeared, but a majority of work in the 1990s continued to be constrained by social control models of explanation.28 In reaction to The Bell Cuwe, which was published in

’6For example, Edgar B. Gumbert and Joel Spring, The Superschool and the Supwstate: American Education in the Twentieth Century, 1918-1970 (New York: Wiley, 1974), 87-1 12; Leon Kamin, “The Science and Politics of IQ,” Social Research 41 (Autumn 1974): 387-425; Clarence J. Karier, “Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State,” in Roots of a Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century eds. Clarence J. Karier, Paul C. Vio- las, and Joel Spring (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1973), 108-137.

*’For example, Paula S. Fass, “The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework,” Amer- ican Journal of Education 88 (August 1980): 43 1-459; William B. Thomas, “Black Intellectu- als, Intelligence Testing in the 1930s, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” Teachers College Record 85 (Spring 1984): 258-292; William B. Thomas, “Black Intellectuals’ Critique of Early Men- tal Testing: ALittle Known Saga of the 1920s,” AmericanJournal ofEducation 90 (May 1982): 259-292; Wayne Urban, “The Black Scholar and Intelligence Testing: The Case of Horace Mann Bond,”Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 25 (October 1989): 323-334; Stephen Williams, “From Polemics to Practice” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1986).

*8For example, Michael Ackerman, “Mental Testing and the Expansion of Education- al Opportunity,” History of Education Quarter4 35 (Fall 1995): 279-300; Benjamin Beit-Hal- lahami, “Science, Ideology, and Ideals: The Social History of IQ Testing,” Centennial Review 38 (Spring 1994): 341-360; John Carson, “Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence,” Isis 84 (June 1993): 278-309; Jose L. Cerezo, “Human Nature as Social Order: A Hundred Years of Psychornetrics,”Joarnal of Social and Biological Structures 14 (October 1991): 409-434; Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and Amm‘ca’s Children


1994, a range of scholars returned to primary and critical, secondary historical sources on testing and the sociology of k n o ~ l e d g e . ~ ~ As is evident from this work, standardized achievement and intelligence tests became central to capitalistic and meritocratic projects. These histories show how tests help/ed conserve prejudices, promote/d eugenics, and allocate/d opportunity across boundaries of class, disability, gender, race, and sexuality. W e also have a picture of how tests and psychotherapeutic knowledge were used to reinforce the segregation of school classrooms and differentiation of curricula. Still, a vast majority of these histories are focused on ideology and “effects” of testing practices and fail to come to grips with the inherent politics of individual apparatus and with uses other than grouping and sorting. Historians of testing have yet to realize the importance of Foucauldian insights: Testing practices became established through the mundane distribution and consumption of everyday apparatus like diaries, tests, and records and not through some pervasive, hegemonic effect of corporate capitalism, industry, or science. Historians continue to confront tests in administrative offices, after they have been commercially distributed and used-post-contrivance and classroom consumption.

As Raymond Callahan showed in Education and the Cult of Eficiency, between the 1900s and 1920s, school offices became as technologxally complex as modern business offices3” By the mid 1920s, over 85 percent of 522 secondary school administrators surveyed were regularly utilizing cumula- tive records, desk calendars, filing cabinets, mimeograph machines, program clocks, surveys, telephones, tests, and typewriters. Accusations of inefficiency in administrative practice were deflected toward classrooms and teachers. But the adoption and uses of tests and these other technolo- g7es are not explained by arguing, as Callahan and more recent historians did, that vulnerable educators eventually assimilated commercial, scientif-

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); George Madaus, “A Technological and Historical Consideration of Equity Issues Associated with Proposals to Change the Nation’s Testing Policy,” Harvard Educational Review 64 (Spring 1994): 76-102; Peuina, “‘The Never- To-Be-Forgotten Investigation”’; Judith R. Raftery, “Missing the Mark: Intelligence Test- ing in Los Angeles Public Schools, 1922-1932,” History ofEdwation Quuvierly 28 (Spring 1988): 73-93; Patrick Ryan, “Unnatural Selection: Intelligence Testing, Eugenics and American Political Cultures,”?oumal of Social History 30 (Spring 1997): 669-685.

‘’For example, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg and Aaron Gleason, eds., Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Special issues were ded- icated to this by the Amertcan BehavioralScimtist 39 (September 1995): 6-1 lO,3oumalofNegro Education 64 (Summer 1995): 2 18-266, and Skeptic 3 (Summer/Fall 1995): 59-93.

joBarbara Berman, “Business Efficiency, American Schooling, and the Public School Superintendency: A Reconsideration of the Callahan Thesis,” Histoly of Education Quarterly 2 3 (Fall 1983), 297-321; Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult ofEficiacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); W. C. Reavis and Robert Woellner, “Labor-Saving Devices Used in Office Administration in Secondary Schools,” School Revim 36 (December 1928): 736-744.


ic, and technological values.” Explanations for testing continue to be mold- ed from industrial or scientific assimilation models. In the “industry of education” model, vulnerable administrators were forced or chose to run their plants like a business; schools became factories and classrooms became con- veyors for the mass production and standardization of products (students). Tests were machine tools for stamping products with a market value. The “science of education” model suggests that misguided yet humanistic researchers could not resist the seduction of scientific methods to system- atically collect data and experiment with groups of subjects.jz Tests were an objective means toward an end of making education rational. T o stabi- lized industrial and scientific models, “revisionist” historians appended a model of meritocratic and liberal corporate control.

Testing from a liberal corporate control perspective was a tool of cap- italists and others with obvious vested interests in preserving the social order. “Efficiency” in this light was a corporate movement to “classify, stan- dardize, and rationalize human beings to serve the productive interests of a society essentially controlled by wealth, privilege, and status.’’33 Here, education, and basically corrections, health, and jurisprudence were politically designed to control immigrants and working classes in the interests of the affluent and corporate. Psychatrists, psychologrsts, teachers, and social workers pursued the rewards of corporate capitalism toward ignoble ends. Hegemony of the liberal, corporate elites was rationalized within a meritocratic and hierarchical system of social order. Without the micropolitics of how this happened, testing was social control of the best kind. The industrial, scientific, social control, and liberal corporate control models explain “everything in general and nothing in particular.”” A binary of control, sci-

“Herbert Kliebard, Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory (New York: Routledge, 1992); William J. Reese, “What History Teaches us About the Impact of Educational Research on Practice,” in Review ofResearch in Education 24 ed. fsghar Iran-Nejad and P. David Pearson (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Asso- ciation, 1999), 1-19; Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, History oftbe ScboolCurriculuvn (New York: Macmillan, 1989).

”Viewing the “science of education” as an idiom in the domain of education can be helpful; searching in history for a “science of education” or “scientific ideology “ as opposed to practices in the anthropology, economics, psychology or sociology of education is futile. Ellen C. Lagemann, “Contested Terrain: A History of Education Research in the United States, 1890-1990,” Educational Researcher 26 (December 1997); 5-17; Harry G. Good and James D. Teller, History of’Education (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 380-41 3; Jeraldine Jon- cich, “Whither Thou, Educational Scientist?,” Teachers College Record 64 (October 1962); 1-12; Stephen Petrina, “Science of Education,” in Reader’s Guide to the History of Science ed. Arne Hessenbruch (London: Fitvoy Dearborn Publishers, ZOOO), 680-682; James R. Robarts, “The Quest for a Science of Education in the Nineteenth Century,” History ofEducation Quar- terly (Winter 1968); 43 1-444; R. J. Selleck, “The Scientific Educationist, 1870-1914,” British 30umal of Educational Studies 15 (Winter 1967); 148-165.

”Karier, “Testing for Order and Control,” 108. ’”Martin J. Wiener, “Introduction,” Rice University Studies 67 (Winter 1981): 2. See

also David Labaree, “Politics, Markets, and the Compromised Curriculum,” Harvard Educa- tionalRezkm 57 (November 1987): 483-494.


ence, and technology is liberty, which in itself ironically involves a political governance of control. However stagnant and over-determined, the science of education, technical rationality, and liberal, corporate control became customary explanations for testing within the history of education.

It seems essential to pay attention to the material commerce and consumption of tests within classrooms and offices. Clearly, as Michael Sokal noted, distributions and uses of examinations varied.” Everyday uses of tests have been reduced to an historical explanation of intelligence tests and standardized tests. Teachers have routinely administered paper and pencil tests since at least the 1920s and treated students on a basis of a newfound, psychotherapeutic knowledge. Individualized remedial treatments such as drilling were common, and some students’ maladies were even corrected by the process. Psychotherapeutic apparatus such as workbooks and self- help textbooks were contrived and flourished during the 1920s and 1930s in this clinical context. So tests cannot be privileged over, nor disjoined from, a host of other artifacts if we are to understand how hybrids are main- tained. Tests were used to sort and group, but are also routinely linked to daily procedures for inventing and hygienically shaping the self of body, mind, and soul.

The case of psychologists Luella Cole and Sidney Pressey offers some alternative avenues of inquiry into testing. Through their internships in the Boston Psychopathic Hospital from 191 6 through 191 7, medicine came to play a key role in their testing practices. Models of science or technology are of little help in this case. Like clinicians, Cole and Pressey’s practices were characterized by an unwavering faith in the liberalizing potential of psychotherapeutic knowledge. When they moved from the Psychopathic Hospital to Indiana University (IU), they contrived their own achievement, emotion, and intelligence tests. A close reading of the contrivance of their “Group Point Scale” intelligence test for a “mental survey” in southern Indiana discloses some of the politics of the apparatus. When Cole and Pressey assessed the apparatus after a trial survey, the class and racial differences found were used as evidence of the test’s validity. Since “professional” class children averaged higher than “laborer” and “artisan” class children, and white children higher than “colored” children, those questions that discriminated most were assumed to be well constructed; hence, the test was valid. But since girls scored higher than boys on average, those parts of the apparatus that were seen to favor the girls were redesigned. A new scale was produced to accommodate a particular politics. Test apparatus were tailored to hygienic notions and demands of a market within a materialistic culture, as much as any other consumer product.

the historiography of testing, see Michael Sokal, “Approaches to the History of Psychological Testing,” H h w y of Edzrcation Quarterly 24 (Winter 1984): 419-430.


Ideology was a necessary condition for the testing market, but pop- ularization occurred through mundane test contrivance and consumption. Dozens of psychological clinics and research bureaus were established to popularize school surveying and testing during the mid to late 1910s. For example, the research bureau at IU was one of 25 university bureaus and 46 city bureaus that existed in 192 1. In the IU bureau, Cole and Pressey contrived 5 different achievement, emotion, and intelligence tests between 1918 and 1921, and about 600,000 blanks of those were used or sold at a profit to their university. The Public School Publishing Company and the Stoelting Company began producing and distributing Cole’s and Pressey’s tests in 192 1. By the end of the 1920s, 47 of their tests were commercially marketed and about 12 million blanks were used or purchased. Estimated annual sales of 40 million tests during the late 1920s suggest the existence of a burgeoning consumer market for psychological products. Textbook publishers such as Bobbs-Merrill, Ginn, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill and The World Book Company had, or eventually would account for, a major share of the test market in the 1920s and 1930s. As publishers recognized, the labor in scoring a test often determined the difference between sale and no sale. Companies such as International Business Machines (IBM) made the automation of test-scoring high stakes in a bid to eliminate this aspect of clerical labor.j6 In 1937 IBM’s test-scoring machine was used to score the New York Regent’s Inquiry Test. The machine scored 402,595 tests, averaging 935 tests per hour over the course of a month of 13-hour days. The financial savings were $15,000. Costs per test were reduced, in some cases from $5.00 per student to 5 cents per student. Detailed studies of the consumption and production of tests and their market maintenance by publishing companies and IBM remain uncharted terrain for researcher^.^' Clearly, the commerce and design of test apparatus continue to buttress particular modes of discrimination.

What historians “see” when they peer into classrooms and offices of the “School of Tomorrow” can be liberated or constrained by what they “look” for. Histories of testing have yet to be cast in frameworks of the

’6Bird T. Baldwin and Madorah Smith, “Educational Research,” United States Bureau ofEducation Bulletin 13 (September 1924): 491-494; Frank Baker, “Automation of Test Scor- ing, Reporting, and Analysis,” in Educatzmal Measurement ed. Robert Thorndike (Washing- ton, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1971), 202-236; Julia J. Peterson, The Iowa Testing Program (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1983); Stephen Petrina, “Satisfactory Marks: The Educational Records Bureau and the IBM Test Scoring Machine, 1929-1940” (unpublished manuscript, 2000).

”See Kurt Danziger, Comtrzuting the Subert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101 - 1 17; Walter Haney, George Madaus and Robert Lyons, The Fractured Marketplace for Standardized Testing (Boston: Kluwer, 1993); Gail A. Hornstein, “Quantifymg Psycholog- ical Phenomena: Debates, Dilemmas, and Implications,” in The Rise ofExperimentation In American Psychology ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 19.


recent sociologes of testing, so it is difficult to assess their value.1* In Cole and Pressey’s case, sociologies of medical practice are more insightful than sociologies of educational practice: Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic is as helpful here as Discipline and Punish. Given the case of Cole and Pressey, the modern classroom may have been constructed through models of the clinic and dispensary even as administrators ran their offices and hallways on models of the efficient business establishment. The challenge is to demonstrate how agents such as classroom, clinic, IBM, nurse, office, philan- thropist, publisher, student, teacher, test, and textbook are articulated in the hybrids produced through education.

Socializing Commodities in Clasmoomns: School Textbooks and Media

With new consumer markets established during the 1890s and early 1900s came a “commercialization of literature,” and book publishing was placed in a competitive system of finance ~apita1.j~ A proliferation in the volume of textbooks produced and purchased accompanied changes in text commodities. New publishers such as Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, and Pren- tice-Hall assumed a large market share through their specialization in textbooks and collusion with the politics of “state uniformity” laws. From this time period, the state would play an increasingly regulatory role in dictat- ing and franchising what would and would not be written in these special- ized texts. Similar to testing, these changes were accompanied by a rapid increase of studies by interventionists in the hygene, physiology, and psychology of reading.+’ Psychologsts, such as Luella Cole, provided grist for the design of modern texts by linking the “mechanical habits” of readers to the mechanical construction of books.” New textbooks embodied a particular politics of reading just as their manifest and latent contents reflected a politics of industry, liberty, morality, piety, and socialization.

InPatricia M. Broadfoot, Education, Assesment and Society: A SociologicalAnalyss (Phladel- phia: Open University Press, 1996); Alan Hanson, Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Lqe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Carl Milofsky, Testers and Test- ing: The Sociology ofSchool Psychology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

”Alfred Iverson, “The Development of the School Textbook,” American School Board Journal 81 (August 1930): 58-59, 122; Charles A. Madison, Book Publisbing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 242.

‘OWilliam S. Gray, “Physiology and Psychology of Reading,” in Enryclopdedia of Edu- cational Research (third edition) eds. Chester Harris with Marie Liba (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 1096-1 114; Nelson Henry, “The Cost of Textbooks,” in The Textbook in American Edu- cation, 13th Yearbook o f the National Society for the Study of Education ed. Guy M. Whipple (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Company, 193 l), 222-223; Luke, Literary, Telat- books and Ideology, 65.

“Martha Pollock and Luella Cole Pressey, “An Investigation of the Mechanical Habit? in Reading of Good and Poor Readers,” Educational Research Bulletin 4 (May 1925): 273-275; Luella Cole Pressey, “Simple Investigations of the Textbooks of Today and Yesterday,” Edzl- rational Research Bulletin 5 (May 1926): 223-227.


For the most part, histories of textbooks up through the early 1960s were situated in a discourse of progress and benevolence, In this discourse, the writing and publishing of primers, readers, spellers, and other schoolbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolved from a conservative, simple practice and blatant politics to more politically neutral, refined, sophisticated practices of the twentieth century.4z Two exceptions to this genre of history were Richard Mosier’s Making the American Mind, published in 1947, and Ruth Elson’s Guardians of Tradition, published in 1964.

Written in the midst of a conservative era of American politics and education, Mosier’s book was a critical and penetrating analysis of the McGuffey schoolbooks, which were first published in 1836. Aggressive distribution, sales, and use through the 1920s made the McGuffey readers one of the most popular series of schoolbooks in United States hi~tory.~’ Citing manifest stands on issues like individualism and private property, Mosier placed the readers squarely in the conservative tradition of the politics of liberty. He demonstrated how and where the readers effectively converted their philosophical and religious tradition into a guardian of established institutions and social order. The readers’ lessons rationalized capitalist and middle-class virtues and appealed to Calvinist or Christian ethics. Private property was divinity in the readers; the Sovereign Will was toward an individual attainment of wealth or toward the virtues of the middle class.

Elson’s Guardians of Tradition expanded Mosier’s interpretations to include a wide variety of nineteenth-century arithmetic, geography, and history texts, readers and spellers. Like Mosier, Elson situated the whole of these texts in the conservative tradition. Readers and geography texts in this century explained the exploitation of nature in terms of God’s will and plan. Geography and history texts placed “white” European races on the top of the evolutionary and divine scales. Stories depicted aboriginal peo- ples as primitive and savage. In confederate and northern histories and geographies, Africans are depicted as “the most degraded of the races.” For Elson, schoolbooks for “readin’, ritin’ and rithmetic” in the nineteenth century created a “world of fantasy ... made up by adults as a guide for their children.”@ The politics of industry, liberty, morality, and patriotism in these

+?William E. Marsden, “Historical Approaches to Curriculum Study,” in Postwar Cur- riculum Development: An Historical Appraisal ed. William E. Marsden (London: History of Edu- cation Society, 1979), 77-101; For example, Charles Carpenter, Histoly ofAmerican Schoolbooks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); John Nietz, OM Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961); idem., The Evolution ofAmerican Secondaly School Text- books (Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle Company, 1966).

’)Richard Mosier, Making the American Mind: Social and Moral Ideas in The McGufley Readers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1947), 154-178; See also Finkelstein, Governing the Young; David B. Tyack, Tzcrning Points in American Educational Histoly (Toronto: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1967), 178-227.

“Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Cen- tuly (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 87, 337.

Histories and Historiogruphies of Technologies 93

books are clear and designed to make an unmistakable impression on young minds.

The politics of textbooks and their socializing roles were made salient during the 1920s and 1930s in the United States as economic and religious traditions were threatened in practice and text.4s John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was brought to trial, convicted, and fined for teaching evolution from the science book Civic Biology. His trial received national media attention and fanfare as a case of state censorship of textbooks. In the late 1930s, Mun and His Changing Society, Harold Rugg’s social studies textbook, was condemned as a threat to American values for criticisms of the economic and social systems in the United States. Alexander Rippa situated this controversy in the politics of liberty. Institutions such as the American Legion, Advertising Federation of America, National Associa- tion of Manufacturers, and Nation’s Business launched a campaign to defend against Rugg’s critiques of free enterprise, a keystone complement of civil and religious liberty in the American tradition. Between 1929 and 1939, a series of Rugg’s books threatened the established collusion between textbook publishers, free enterprise, and government. The result of the “free enterprise campaign” was public book burnings and bans in school districts, such as New York City in 1941, in a larger crusade to eliminate certain textbooks.%

As state censorship and sanctioned ideology continue to operate in textbook practices, “what is at stake?” continues to be a question for historians. In Learning t o Divide the World, John Willinsky showed how textbooks and other artifacts used in English, science, and social studies classrooms embody a “legacy of imperialism” from centuries of European and western colonizing conquests.+’; Textbooks, specifically, and education and literacy more generally, continue to do the work of empire. Written in the tradition of Mosier and Elson, recent histories such as Willinsky‘s, generally

”For example, Harvey Lehman, “Social Forces Affecting the Curriculum,” Edzication- a1 Review 75 (1928): 74-86; Guy M. Whipple, “Are the Contents of Textbooks Dictated by Propagandists?,” The Nation’s Schools 12 (1933): 21-25.

“S. A. IGppa, “The Textbook Controversy and the Free Enterprise Campaign, 1940- 1941,” History ofEducation~otirnal9 (Spring 1958): 49-58; See also Michael Katz, “American History Textbooks and Social Reform in the 19305,’’ Pedagogicu Historica 6 (1966): 143-160; Herbert Kliebard and Greg Wegner, “Harold Rugg anti the Reconstruction of the Social Studies Curriculum,” in The Fo?7nation of the School Suhje& ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz (New York: Falrner Press, 1987), 268-287; Donald Robinson, “Patriotism and Economic Control: The Censure of Harold Rugg,” (Ph.D. diss, Rutgers University, 1983); Daniel Tanner, “The Textbook Controversies,” in Critical Issues in Czirricuhm, 87th yearbook of the National Socieq o f the Study of Education ed. Laurel Tanner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 122- 147; On this issue of collusion, see Oisin P. Rafferty, “Balancing the Books: Brokerage Poli- tics and the ‘Ontario Readers Question,”’Historical Studies in Education 4 (Spring 1992): 79-95.

+-John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 4.


focus on the politics of latent contents. Historians of history and science textbooks, for example, link contents with interests.’* Case studies by James Hull and Steven Selden demonstrated how certain ideologres of textbooks not only serve the state, but also serve the hegemonic interests of engineers and scientists. Selden cast biology texts, written in the 1910s through the 1940s, in supporting roles for the American and Canadian eugenics projects. Biology texts were also crafted to support the anti-Semitic project of the German Nazis in the late 1930s, as shown by Gregory Wegner.+’ Hon- or6 Vink provided a picture of how literacy and textbooks were used to solidify the politics of authority, religion, and state hegemony for the Bel- gian colonization of the Congo, or present-day Zaire.

Indeed, Vink‘s work reflects a larger trend in histories which aim to articulate literacy, reader, teacher, and text with politics.so For example, Willinsky argued that in England during the late 1 8 0 0 ~ ~ “literacy-as-mass- education, English-as-academic-discipline, and literature-as-canon” developed coincidentally through efforts at socializing working-class children in modern ways of self-cultivation and civil life.” When English was constructed as a discipline, social mobility became increasingly contingent on literature-the Great Book. As Willinsky suggested, histories of literacy have for the most part been occupied with literature or print literacy in a conventional sense. Edward Stevens’s The Grammar o f the Machine depart-

‘‘Yean Dhombres, “French Textbooks in the Sciences, 1750-1850,” History of Educa- tion 13 (1984): 153-161; James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Jill G. Morawski, “Edu- cating the Emotions: Academic Psychology, Textbooks, and the Psychology Industry, 1890- 1940,” in Inventing the Psychological eds. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 2 17-244; Yoko Thakur, “History Textbooks Reform in Allied Occu- pied Japan,” History ofEducation Quarterly 35 (Fall 1995): 261-278.

IgJames Hull, “Strictly by the Book: Textbooks and the Control of Production in the North American Pulp and Paper Indusqv,” H i t q of Edmatzon 27 (Spring 1998): 85-95; Steven Selden, “Selective Traditions and the Science Curriculum: Eugenics and the Biology Text- book, 1914-1949,” Science Education 75 (September 1991): 493-512; idem., Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Rucimt in America (New York: Teachers College Press. 1999); Gre- gory Wegner, “Schooling for a New Mythos: Race, Anti-Semitism and the Curriculum Mate- rials of a Nazi Race Educator,” Pedugogica Historica 30 (June 1994): 189-2 13.

”For example, Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke and Kieran Egan, eds., Literacy, Society and Schooling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Barbara Finkelstein, “Read- ing, Writing and the Acquisition of Identity in the United States: 1790-1860,” in Regulated ChildredLiberated Children ed. Barbara Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), 1 14- 139; Harvey Graff, The Labyrinths of Literaq: Refleciom of Litera9 Past and Present (Pitts- burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Carl Kaestle, “Literacy and Diversity: Themes from a Social History of the American Reading Public Since 1880,” History ofEducation Quar- terly 28 (Winter 1988): 523-542; Carl Kaestle with Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence Sted- man, Katherine Tinsley and William Trollinger, Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); special theme issue on the history of literacy, History ofEducation Quarterly 30 (Winter 1990); John Willinsky, The Triumph of Literatureflhe Fate ofliteracy (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).

”Willinsky, The Triumph ofliteratzwe, 10-1 1.


ed from conventional historiography. Stevens showed how working-class identities were shaped through “technical literacy,” or the spatial skills and understandings of machine grammar. Not surprisingly, historians of literacy and texts have generally relied on psycholinguistic and semiotic theory for interpreting content and overlooked textual form. Allan Luke’s analysis of the content and form of the Dick andJane series of readers is an important exception in recent histories of literacy and texts.

The first of a series of Dick andJane basal readers was introduced in the United States in 1930 and developed by psychologist William Gray and writer Zerna Sharp. With expertise in the hygiene, physiology, and psychology of reading, Gray and Sharp were hired by the publisher Scott, Foresman and Company to help develop a new line of “modern” textbooks. Dick andJane readers were at the base of the company’s “Curriculum Foun- dation” series that covered the entire range of elementary school subjects. By the 1950s, Dick andJane was a part of the reading curriculum for 80 percent of all American students learning to read. Like the McGuffey readers, Dick andJane readers dispensed, through a “corporately generated fiction,” particular notions of liberty and morality. But the modern textbooks also regulated a reconstruction of the young reader. Words and stories drawn from psychological and sociologxal studies of childhood were reconfigured in language patterns. As Luke wrote, these commodities represented an “altogether unprecedented genre of literature: the short literary passages consisting of fables and tales of the previous century were superseded by the lexically, syntactically, and semantically controlled texts about modern” living. The new books “were deliberately sequenced-through controls on lexical density and sentence-level syntax, through stress on repeated ‘sight words,’ and through story structures that limited literary trope and com- plexity.”5z More than a textbook, Dick andJane was a peculiar hybrid articulating corporate teams of consultants, illustrators, psychologsts, sociologists, and writers with educational practices.

Similar teams were assembled to produce and program educational film, radio, and television during the first third of the twentieth century. Signifylng the popularity of the new audiovisual or media specialists, the Department of Visual Instruction in the National Education Association grew from a few dozen members in 1923, its founding year, to 500 in 1942 and to 5,000 in the early 1980s. Funded for the most part by private media corporations, the audiovisual specialists were enlisted in the 1920s and 1930s

’2Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology, 7 1 ; Allan Luke, “The Secular Word: Catholic Reconstructions of Dick and Jane,” in T h e Politics of the Textbook eds. Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith (New York: Routledge, 1991), 161-190, on 172,184; Suzanne de Castell and Alan Luke, “Literacy Instruction: Technology and Technique,” in Language, Authority and Critirimt: Readings MI the Scbool Textbook eds. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke and Carmen Luke (New York: Routledge, 1989), 77-95.


to produce educational media and assess the “effects” of media images and technologies on young people. The Eastman Kodak Company funded a range of market and “effect” studies of their educational silent films produced in the 1920s. Agencies formed to regulate media industries in education, such as the Motion Picture Research Council, argued for censorship, moral codes, and literacy lessons for educational film and radio in the 1930s. Ironically, the arguments from media industries and their censors were the same: film, radio, and television could maintain powerful influences on the bodies, hearts, and minds of students. The expectation was that the wel- coming of each new media into education would be checked with precau- tions for legitimate assimilation (See Figure 2.)53 A result was a strange hybrid and, like textbooks, only those media messages that were ideologically appropriate were officially admitted into the schools. It was no coin- cidence that media content selected as appropriate for socialization by private enterprise was the same as that selected by most educators.

In Images of American L i f , Joel Spring argued that generally a contested practice of “ideological management” has governed the production, consumption, and regulation of media in American schools. Through case studies of film, radio, and television (commercial and public), Spring demonstrated the inclusion of select, and often white middle-class, views on hygiene, morality, patriotism, and piety to the exclusion of conflicting views. The- matic of Spring’s premise, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) employed Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Orches- tra, to produce an educational hour in music appreciation in 1928. In 193 1, that hour was received by 150,000 schools, where an estimated 60 million students sat and listened in classrooms and assembly halls. Through Dam- rosch’s productions, which ended in 1942, students were provided an education in the elite culture and discipline of symphonic arrangement, as opposed to the subversive improvisation of jazz or lyrics of folk music. The end result, argued Spring, of a hybrid collusion among the likes of art, educators, government, NBC, parents, and philanthropists was the control of ideas or ideological management and mental hygiene.s4

~~

13Marjorie Cambre, “Historical Overview of Formative Evaluation of Instructional Media Products,” Educational Communications and Technology Journal 29 (Spring 1981): 3-25; Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Clusrroom Use of Educational Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); Henry Girou, Disturbing Pleamres (New York: Routledge, 1994), 47-59; Richard Hull, “A Note on the History Behind ETV,” in Education- al Television: The Next Ten Years ed. Institute for Communications Research (Stanford: Insti- tute for Communications Research, 1962), 334-345; Harold A. Layer, “From Radiovision to Video ... and Television in Between,” Audiovisual Imtnution 20 (May 1975): 6-1 1; Anthony Zaitz, “The History of Educational Television,” 1932-1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wis- consin-Madison, 1960).

l+Joel Spring, Imges of American L i f : A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio, and Tekukiun (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); William C. Bagley, “Radio School Days Begin for More than 60,000,000 Pupils,” The Nation’s Schools

Histories and Hi.rtoriographies of Technologies 97

Fig. 2 . Reprinted with permission from the American School Board 30~mal (July). Copyright (1929), the National School Boards Asso- ciation. All rights reserved.

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the motion picture industry produced thousands of mental hygrene and social guidance films for classrooms. Ken Smith documented 250 of these and cataloged them within eight genres ranging from “fitting in” to “bloody hghways.” These ten-minute “cel- luloid treatises” were produced by the “hardheaded businessmen” of companies like Coronet Studios and “scripted under the watchful eyes of sociologists, psychologrsts, and Ph.D.s, the h g h priests of postwar social doctrine.” From 1945 through 1950, Coronet averaged a film every 4.2 worhng days and collected about $300,000 per year on their productions. In Coronet’s Are You Popular?, produced in 1947 and reproduced in 1957, girls were either

8 (Dec. 193 1): 43-44, H. G. Cisin, “Modernizing Educational Methods Through Radio Insauc- tion,” The Nation’s Schools 8 (July 1931): 31-34.


princesses or sluts and got noticed through appearance and social graces. Carolyn, the movie’s protagonist princess, modeled proper behavior in dat- ing, humor, phone conversation, and relationships. Brian Low argued that the National Film Board of Canada’s role in mental hygiene was similar to Coronet’s, demonstrating, like Spring, the indistinction between the politics of commercial and public productions.S’

In The Children of Telstm Kate Moody argued that student audiences were not always “passive” consumers of, or audiences for, the mass media in schools. Moody offered a descriptive history of the Murray Avenue Mid- dle School’s television production studio where, beginning in September, 1966, daily broadcasts were made &om a basement studio to the school’s nineteen closed-circuit television sets. In the new $28,000 installation, students produced their own version of instructional television, often mim- icking the genres of private and public television. By constructing their own media, the students produced a particular literacy to counter the 3,000 to 4,000 hours of television viewing accumulated through their elementary years. While this school in Larchmont, New York, may have been overly privileged in resources a t the time, Moody’s case history is an example of the decentering of textbooks during the 1960~.’~ Commodities such as paper- back books, film, language laboratories, teaching machines, television, and programmed texts converged in hybrid forms to threaten the lucrative, school text publishing market. One result of this convergence was that new technology producers marketed their commodities as individualized and politically “neutral” to capitalize on accusations that mass media and textbooks were indifferent to individuality while being too left or right wing.

Efforts to individualize and “depoliticize” texts by emphasizing functional literacy characterized the producers of programmed, remedial commodities for self-instruction, such as IBM’s DISTAR (Directive Instructional System for Teachers in Arithmetic and Reading). DISTAR was an exten- sion of the Science Research Associate’s (SRA) reading series of the 1960s and 1970s. This hybrid of media, corporate politics, and textbooks cost $54,000 per primary school or nearly $2 million per urban district. The SRA series embodied a program of self-instruction and comportment; instructional management was in the text. “To hell with the teacher,” DISTAR‘s corporate manager exclaimed; the teacher could now become a “learning con- sultant.” DISTAR’s form was designed, much like the Dick andJane readers, through studies of linguistic “deficits” of working-class students. In con-

iiKen Smith, Mental Hygiene Classrovm Film, 1945-1970 (New York: Blast Books, 1999), 18,22; Brian Low, “NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Cana- da, 1939-1989” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1999).

’%ate Moody, The ChiMren of Telstar: Early Experiments in School Television Production (New York: Center for Understanding Media, 1999).

Histories and Historiapaphies of Technologies 99

tent and form, DISTAR’s individualized curriculum was class biased, racist, and sexist.”

Individualizing Commodities in Curriculum: Insimctional Technologies

Throughout the twentieth century in education, a constellation of remedial apparatus was configured into new hybrids in the schools. Exam- ination and remediation practices became central to administration and instruction, policy, and meritocratic projects in general. Individualized instruction was reinforced by an array of new, consumable paper products introduced during the 1920s. Self-aids, or self-teaching materials such as workbooks, were introduced as therapeutic apparatus to articulate with instruction. The term “workbook” did not appear in educational discourse until the late 1920s; by the early 1930s a publisher advertised seventy titles and boasted their uses in 4,000 cities. In the midst of the Depression, one author asked “Where is this current workbook craze leading us?” Entire units of work, or “progressive” curriculum packages, also came under control of publishers at this time. One critic noted in the late 1930s that curriculum became akin to shopping for “a can of peas or a can of pineapple by a number which indicates content.” Educators joined retail giants A.C. Gilbert, Borden, Montgomery Ward, and Woodward & Lothrop in entertaining, outfitting, socializing, and creating an image of distinction and individualization for North American youth. Tests, textbooks, and remedial commodities were articulated with psychologists, publishing houses, and media producers in a hybrid design for individualization and self-help.j8

Sidney Pressey, a product of this culture of self-distinction, contrived an intelligence testing machine, which he transformed during 1924-1934 into an “Automatic Teacher.” His machine automated and individualized routine classroom processes such as testing and drilling. It could reduce the burden of testing and scoring for teachers and therapeutically treat students after examination and diagnosis. In this regard, it was designed to “fit” into

’“‘Bias Pervades Distar Content,” Interracial Books for Children 5 (July 1974): 1, 3, 6; Vivian Gaman, “Reappraising Distar in Theory and Practice,” Interracial Booksfor Children 5 (July 1974): 1, 3, 5,6-9; Douglas D. Noble, “A Bill of Goods: The Early Marketing of Corn- puter Based Education and its Implications for the Present Moment,” in The International Handbook of Teachers and Teaching eds. Bruce J. Biddle, Thomas Good, and Ivor Goodson (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 1321-1375, on 1328.

’ST. V. Goodrich, “Is the Workbook a Necessity or a Luxury,” School Executives Mag- azine 50 (April 193 1): 359; A.W. Elliott, “This Workbook Craze,” SchoolExecutives Magazine 51 (September 1931): 19; Ruth Sneitz, “An Evaluation of Units of Work,” Childhood Educa- tion 15 (February 1939): 258; “TheMerchant to the Child,” Fortune 4 (November 1931): 71; Joan Shelley Rubin, “Self, Culture, and Self-Culmre in & I d e m America: The Early Histo- ry of the Book-of-the-Month Club,”Journal ofAmvican History 71 (March 1985): 782-806; idem., “‘Information Please!’: Culture and Expertise in the Interwar Period,”American Quar- tvb 35 (Winter 1983): 499-517.


existing classroom processes and appeal to new interests in the individualization of education. For Pressey, the Automatic Teacher was a hybrid of machine, industrial design, instructor, and psychology (See Figure 3.) By 1930 and after the batch production of 200 units, the Automatic Teacher was recognized as a commercial failure. Pressey is nevertheless acknowledged by practitioners of educational psychology and educational technology as the “Grandfather” of the teaching machine, programmed learning, and computer-assisted instruction (CAI). He achieved this gendered status through a windfall of publicity surrounding a government subsidy for commercial investors during the 1950s and 1960s. As the practitioners’ story is told, the Automatic Teacher was positioned on the cusp of what Pressey called an “industrial revolution” in education.” Pressey’s story helped cod- ify and perpetuate the “revolution” in the “School of Tomorrow” myth and served a symbolic function for educational psychologists and technologists. In 1913, Thomas Edison had predicted the obsolescence of teachers and books due to a commercialization of educational film. The origins of the revolution myth are unclear; but over time, this rhetoric has become idiomat- ic in educational technology histories and prophesies.60

Histories of educational technology, as written by psychologists, eng- neers, or media and educational technologists tend to be hardware-orient- ed overviews and advocacies. These have been general6’ or specific to

I’Petrina, “From Intelligence Testing Machine to Automatic Teacher;” Sidney L. Pressey, “A Third and Fourth Contribution Toward the Coming ‘Industrial Revolution’ in Education,” School and Society 36 (November 1932): 672; Ludy T . Benjamin, “A History of Teaching Machines” American Pychologzst 43 (September 1988): 71 1.

“Edison was quoted in the New York Dramatic Mirror as saying, “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools .... Our school system will be completely changed in ten years.” Fred- erick James Smith, “The Evolution of the Motion Picture,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 9 July 1913, 24.

6’Charnel Anderson, History o f Instructional Technology I: Techology in American Educa- tion, 1650-1900, (Washington, D.C.: United States Office of Education, 1961); George H. Buck, “Teaching Machines and Teaching Aids in the Ancient World,” McGill3ournal ofEdu- cation 24 (Winter 1989): 32-54; Michael Eraut, “Conceptual Frameworks and Historical Devel- opment,” in The International Encyclopedia of Educational Technology ed. Mchael Eraut (New York: Pergamon Press, 1989), 11-2 1; James D. Finn and Paul Saettler, Histoly of Instruction- al Technology, II: The Technical Development of the New Media, (Washington, DC: U.S. Office of Education, 1961); Henrietta Lard, Evolutionary Changes in Educational Technology, (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1979); Wesley C. Meierhenry, “A Brief History of Educational Technology,” in Educational Media Yearbook, 1984 ed. James W. Brown (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1984), 3-1 3; Robert M. Morgan, “Educational Technology: Adolescence to Adult- hood” Educational Communication and Technology~ournal26 (Summer 1978): 142-1 52; Robert A. Reiser, “Instructional Technology: A History,” in Instructional Technology: Foundations ed. Robert M. Gagne (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1987); Paul Saettler, The History of Insmctional Technology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); idem., “The Roots of Educational Technology,” Programmed Learning and Educational Technology 15 (February 1978): 7-1 5; idem., The Evolution ofAmerican Educational Technology, (Englewood, CA: Libraries Unlimited, Inc., 1990).


Fig. 3. Pressey’s “Automatic Teacher.” Photo courtesy of the Archives of the His- tory of American Psychology.

audiovisual technologies,62 teaching machines,6’ programmed learning? and computer-based education.6’ For the most part in these histories, edu-

“Donald Ely, ed., The Changing Role of the Audiovisual Process in Education (Washing- ton, D.C.: National Education Association, 1963), 6-20; Joel Rakow, “A Perspective on the Audiovisual Movement in America: The Audiovisual Myth and Its Implication for Educa- tional Technology,” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1978).

“Benjamin, “A History of Teaching Machines”; William Deutsch, “Teaching Machines, Programming, Computers, and Instructional Technology: The Roots of Performance Tech- nology,” PerfDTntance and Instrzution 3 1 (February 1992): 20; Robert Glaser, “Christmas Past, Present, and Future,” in Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning eds. A. A. Lumsdaine and Robert Glaser (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1960), 23-3 1; Sid- ney L. Pressey, “Autoinstruction: Perspectives, Problems, Potentials” in Theories of Learning and Instruction, 63rd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study $Education, part I ed. Ernest R. Hilgard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 354-370; Bhurms F. Sldnner, “Teach- ing Machines” Science 24 (October 1958): 969-977; Lawrence M. Stolurow, Teaching by Machine, (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1961), 17-51.

@Edgar Dale, “Historical Setting of Programmed Instruction,” in Programmed Znrtruc- tion, 66th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of’Edwation, part I1 ed. Philip Lange (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 28-54; James Hartley, “Programmed Instruc- tion 1954-1974 A Review,” Programmed Learning and Educational Technology 11 (November 1974): 278-291; Richard L. Tapp, A Delineation of the Philosophy and Historical Development of Programmed Instruction, (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1975), 1-40.

“F. L. Blaisdell, “Historical Development of Computer Assisted Instruction,”3ournal of Educational Technology Systems 5 (Spring 1976): 155-170; Glen Bull and Gina Bull, “The

102 Histoy of Education Quarterly

cational technology is politically “neutral” and its influences on education positive. To be sure, early generations of education historians doing syntheses did not entirely neglect the technologies of education, but generally viewed them as instruments of progress and resources for teaching and learning.66 More recent historians doing syntheses of American education also recognized this subject as the ma ti^.^' Despite a surprising number of practitioner and general essays on “instructional technology,” the first syn- thetic monographs on this subject were completed in 1968 and 1990 by media specialist Paul Saettler.

Saettler’s The Histo9 of Inshzcctional Technology and The Evolution of American Educational Technology differed from most practitioner histories in that they extended the meaning of educational technology beyond hardware to include method, technique, and theory. His syntheses included histories on a range of topics including behavioral science, managerial technique, and systems engineering. Focused on practitioners, or audiovisual specialists and educational technologists, Saettler separated curriculum from instruction and technological design from use. He acknowledged a pene- tration of psychotechnological practices in curriculum, through cybernet- ic theory, but could only advocate more and better.68 However, by 1990, he included a retrospective history of the 1950s and 1960s. In The Evolu- tion of American Educational Technology, he downplayed the short shelf life of programmed instruction and teaching machines and emphasized the longevity of technologies that played supporting roles. Behavioral objectives, Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy, cybernetics, disciplinary structures, and task analysis from their development continued to underwrite instructional design through the 1980s. Robert Mager’s Preparing Instructional Objectives sold 1.5 million copies between 1962 and the late 1980s. Jerome

Evolution and Future of Logo,” Computers in the Schools 14 (December 1997): 47-49; Walter Dick, “The Development and Current Status of Computer-Based Instruction,” American Edzi- cational Research Journal2 (Spring 1965): 41-54; Robert Meyers and John K. Burton, “The Foundations of Hypermedia: Concepts and History,” Computers in the Schools 10 (1994): 9-37; Richard Niemiec and Herbert Walberg, “From Teaching Machines to Microcomputers,” Journal of Research on Computing in Education 2 1 (Spring 1989): 263-276; Louis A. Pagliaro, “The History and Development of CAI: 1926-1981, An Overview,” AlbenaJoumal of Educa- tional Research 29 (March 1983): 75-84; Harry Singer and Patricia Phelps, “The History of Computers and their Uses in Education,” ERIC ED 261 351. (1982); JoAnne Troumer, “His- torical Evolution of Educational Software,” ERIC ED 349 936, (1991).

“For example, Lawrence A. Cremin, The Tran.$onnation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-19F7 (New York: Knopf, 1962); Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Edu- cation in the United States: A SnUy and Interpretation ofAmwican Edwational H i s t q (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

67For example, Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 322-372; H. G. Good and J. D. Teller, A His- tory ofAmerican Edwation (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 417-445; Tanner and Tanner, His- toly of the School C~~rriculum.

68Saettler, Histoly of Imtmrtional Technology, 269-270.

Histories and Historiographies of Technologies I03

Bruner’s The Process of Education and Toward a Tbeoly of Instruction, published in 1960 and 1966, were equally influential in curricular and instructional design. Enthusiasm for Bloom’s and related taxonomies, Mager’s objectives, and Bruner’s disciplines showed no signs of abating in 1990; cybernetics and systems engineering were pervasive in administration and individualized instruction. The history of educational technology, for Saet- tler, is curricular history, albeit of the rhetorical curriculum. And curriculum history in many ways became a documentation of traditions where, depending on the historian’s bias, there were either triumphs of “bureau- cratic,” “scientific,” and “technocratic” values over liberal, humanistic practices, or impositions of these values on humanists.

A main story line was that curriculum is forged somewhere between the poles of liberty and rational social Reminiscent of Callahan, curriculum historians wrote of a coincidental “Decline of Humanistic Stud- ies” and “RIse of Scientific Curriculum-Making.”” Some searched for evidence of “student-centered” curriculum and authoritative curricula of control. Theorists described traditions of “Curriculum as Technology” against “Curriculum as Consummatory Experience” or self-actualization.” Practitioners such as Bloom, Mager, and Pressey figured heavily into science and technology, while more liberal practitioners forged a place for humanism. Somehow, technology was configured to underwrite functional, vocational curriculum and liberal humanism supported academic or arts- based curriculum. In these histories that tended to pit the deche of humanism against the rise of science and technology, teachers have few options outside of becoming Luddites, technicians, or defenders of humanism. One difficulty among many here is that curriculum, and generally education, are depicted as technologrcally primitive cultures that increasingly become vulnerable to the “rationality” of twentieth-century science and technology.” When the material culture of schooling is overlooked or undertheorized, primitive culture and revolution myths are perpetuated.

“Barry Franklin, Building the American Cmmunity: The School Curriculum and the Search f i r Social Control (New York: Falmer Press, 1985); Kliebard, Forging the American Cum’ailum, vii; Labaree, “Politics, Markets”; David Labaree, “Does the Subject Matter? Dewey, Democ- racy, and the History of Curriculum,” History ofEducation Quarterly 3 1 (Winter 1991): 513- 52 I ; Tanner and Tanner, History of the School Cum’culum.

Wliebard, Forging the A m m u n Curriculum. ”Elliot Eisner and Elizabeth Vallance, Conflicting Conceptions of Cum’mlum (Berkeley:

McCutchan Publishing, 1974). ’*In 1962, Finn, Perrin , and Campion wrote “the American educational enterprise

exists out of technological balance with other great sectors of the society. As such, it can be viewed as a relatively primitive or underdeveloped culture existing between and among high- ly sophisticated technological cultures.” James Finn, Donald Perrin, and Lee E. Campion, Studies in the Growth oflnstncctimal Technology I (Washington, D.C.: National Education Asso- ciation, 1962), 1.


Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines was a response to traditions of practitioner histories and histories of the rhetorical curriculum. Recognized when it was published in 1986 as potentially becoming “the major source on the history of technology and teaching in the classroom,” the book continues to be popular for critics of educational technology. Cuban tried to answer several questions directed toward classroom uses of film, radio, and instructional television. He suggested that a naturalized cycle of “exhilara- tiodscientific credibility/disappointment/teacher bashing” captures the essence of histories of new, and generally all, educational technologies. Cuban offered a “situationally constrained choice” model, where teachers’ judgment and classroom organization combine to account for the seem- ingly minor roles these technologies played since they were introduced. “Organizational adaptability” governs change or stability; teachers adapt new technologies “to fit” their classroom^.^^ Faults of this adaptability or assimilation thesis aside for now, Cuban failed to come to terms with the politics of the technologies of interest. With few sources, he surveyed sixty years (1920s-1980s) of the history of film, radio, and television in about an equal number of pages. Despite that brevity, he made a contribution by attempting to recover teacher uses of classroom technologies. His explanation for the failure of educational film, radio, and television reflects his earlier histories of failures in “student-centered” teaching.

Cuban’s sustained position that “technological innovations have never been central to any national movement to improve schooling since the origins of public schools” is ahistorical and perpetuates the primitive culture of education myth.74 As Ian Hunter has argued, bureaucracies and technologes are historically contiguous with schooling. The formation of subjects and the “social uses to which education can be put,” says Hunter, “are inseparable from the actual historical assemblage of the school as a moral and physical milieu.”7s One need only look at behavioral objectives, open- air classrooms, playgrounds, school buses, teaching machines, tests, textbooks, working-class curriculum, or reservation schools to realize how central technology was and is to governmentality. It was not just school art and sewing rooms or manual training shops that were made complex in their technology.

”Cuban, Teachers and Machines, 5-6, 59, 66, 105. See also Larry Cuban, “Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wms,” Teachers College Record 95 (Winter 1993): 185-209; Eugene F. Provenzo, “Review of Teachers and Machines,” History of Education Quarterly 26 (Winter 1986): 648; David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopj?: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

>‘Larry Cuban, H m Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Chsrom, 1890- 1980 (New York: Longman Press, 1984), 4,206; See also Cohen, “Educational Technology, Policy and Practice.”

”Hunter, “Assembling the School,” 148; Hunter, Rethinking the School.

Histories and Historiographies of Technologies I05

A similar historical argument, but narrower in scope, was made by Eric G~rmly . ’~ Gormly was concerned with impediments to innovations such as computers, films, and radios and like Cuban, argued that educational technologies fail because their promoters fail to grasp the complex- ity of classroom organization. Yet, we cannot assume apriori that teachers’ senses of classroom organization are any more complex than the educational technologists. An explanation for success and failures of technology requires an understanding of complex historical conditions and micropo- litical details. Situational choice, organizational adaptability, and assimilation as explanations are ultimately ahistorical and contain an assumption that technologies succeed when they “fit” into, or are accommodated by, agents or cultures. Pencil- and paper-test apparatus, when introduced into the schools during the 1900s and 1910s, did not “fit” into an existing classroom organization. Cole and Pressey’s case suggests that their tests were “objective” checks on teachers’ judgment. Administrators and teachers had to be persuaded to use the new technology, which meant an increase in labor and surveillance. There was no comfortable “fit” between these tests and classroom practice; the resultant classroom was different than its pre- decessor. Technology is not merely an aid, instrument, “means,” resource, or tool, as Gormly explicitly, and Cuban implicitly, argued. An outcome, the organization of classrooms for instance, cannot be used to explain how and why a historically controversial innovation was settled. As Marcus demonstrated with Lancaster’s arrangement, classrooms are not extrahis- torical, but rather are in need of political upkeep. Explanations like situational choice, organizational adaptability, or assimilation are drawn from problematic immigration and innovation theories of the 1960s and 1970s.“ T h s interpretive logic deployed by Cuban, Gormly, and David Cohen plays right into the technologists’ hands and Whig history.

For example, citing Callahan, Cohen, and Cuban, James Main suggested that educational technology in the United States since the 1950s has failed because the “rational” visions of innovators are a t odds with pro-

-“Eric K. Gormly, “Critical Perspectives on the Evolution of Technology in American Public Schools,”~ournal of Edzuational Thought 30 (December 1996): 263-286. See also Alan Januszewski, “The Definition of Educational Technology: An Intellectual and Historical Account,” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1994); Mitchell Marovitz, “The Diffusion of Edu- cational Television at the United States Military Academy” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse Universi- ty, 1995).

“For example, David Cohen “Educational Technology and School Organization,’’ in Tecbnology in Edwation: Looking Tuward 2020 eds. Raymond Nickerson and Philip Zodhiate (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1988): 23 1-264; Michael Fullan, “Overview of the Inno- vation Process and the User,” Interchange 3 aanuary 1972): 1-46; Gene Hall and Shirley Hord, -: Facilitating the Process (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Harry Wolcott, Teachers versus Tecbnomats: An Educational Innovation in Anthropological Per- spective (Eugene: University of Oregon, 1977).

106 Histay of Education Quarterly

gressive “democratic or socio-cure visions.”‘* Using curriculum history as his form, Main suggested that concerns with “efficiency and production” hamper a technology’s acceptance or assimilation by teachers. Efficiency and production are rooted in psychologies that reduce learning to “low lev- els of cognition.” He argued that there are forces and policies that influence the success of a technology and notes that technologists typically misunderstand these larger forces. For Main, if technolopsts can only read these forces and design their technologies to fit “democratic” classroom organization, then there would be common use or success.

This would-be successful innovator, or psychotechnologist in B.F. Skinner’s case, is depicted a bit differently in Martha Casas’ biographical work.” Despite the innovative role that Shnnerian and other teaching machines might have played and the huge investment of public subsidies, this technology lasted about a decade (See Figure 4.) Casas’ interpretation of this tilted Cohen, Cuban, Gormly, and Main on their heads. It was Skm- ner who was misunderstood by those radically out-of-step in an innovative time. It was not that Skinner misunderstood teachers and classrooms, it was that teachers misunderstood Skinner and “rational” psychological organization! Her telling of this story is nevertheless uncritical and has all the faults of Cuban’s, Gormly’s, and practitioner histories. She helpfully provided a description of how the Eisenhower and Kennedy cabinets’ support for “behavioral science” linked up to investments in a teaching-machine market. Large-scale funding through the National Defense Education Act helped fund “behavioral” scientists, such as Skinner, for research in classrooms.

Automating Commodities in Classrooms: Teaching Machines and Computers

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Oscar Gandy surveyed the process of subsidizing the capitalization of education during 1958-1974.80 Gandy argued that from 1967-1974 monopoly firms in the educational supply industry, dominated by the defense establishment, lobbied for and received federal subsidies. The government directed $2 billion of subsidies toward the development of educational technology, mostly teaching machines and programmed instruction. The defense firms were able to increase their capital and established a market for their technologies. This subsidized market was

7RJames Main, “Educational Technology and the Curriculum of Production and Effi-

’9Martha Casas, “The History Surrounding the Use of Skinnerian Teaching Machines

“Oscar H. Gandy, “Instructional Technology: The Reselling of the Pentagon” (Ph.D.

ciency, 1950-1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of Houston, 1992), 9.

and Programmed Instruction (1960-1970)” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997).

diss., Stanford University, 1976).

107 Histories and Historiographies of Technologies

Fig. 4. B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine in use during the 1960s. Photo courtesy of Photo Archives, T h e Ohio State University Archives.

a t the base of a $300 to $900 million annual industry for automating education through the 1960s. These private, monopolistic firms had won, or seized, control over the production and distribution of a public technology. Gandy made a significant historiographic contribution by framing a political economy of educational technology. His work did not, however, articulate teaching maches with the huge investment in testing that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s. Nor did he follow the subsidization of defense contractors through to production for the marketplace or through to consumption in classrooms. With the Pentagon as a major supporter of research and with Department of Defense subsidizing development projects, the American military was rearticulated with a range of other agents in yet another strange educational hybrid.


Douglas Noble’s The Clasmoom Arsenal also brought to light this military support for computer based education (CBE) during the 1950s and 1960s. According to Noble, CBE was built with a “military worldview,” where “command and control” and cybernetics defined this hybrid’s character. The design of CBE, he argued, is as important to consider as the use. Noble argued that the possible uses of educational technologies are inherently constricted by their politics. As was Gandy’s choice, Noble did not follow CBE into classrooms and one gets only a vague sense of how automation technologies articulated with students and teachers. In his subsequent work, he followed up on the educational marketing strategies of military contractors during the 1960s and 1970s. In “A Bill of Goods,” he provided case studies of ventures involving General Electric (GE), IBM, SRA, and Time, Inc. All of these ventures were, according to Noble, failed attempts “at hawking ill-conceived computer-based panaceas to the nation’s schools.” He provided a critical flavor of the private and public politicking of the promoters, complementing his earlier analysis of the militarization of CBE. For Noble, since the 1950s educational technology meant little more than huge investments in capital, military subsidization, strategic marketing to publicly funded institutions, and lack of accountability. Corporate ventures were used to exploit schools as research laboratories and are sustained only in the service of profit. Education equals corporate capitalism. As is a liability of The Clasmoom Arsenal, Noble’s latest history did not follow com- modties into classrooms. “A Bill of Goods” moved from corporate boardroom to administrative office, with stops at opportunistic promotional points in between. Unlike Cuban and Gormly, Noble explained failure as misin- formed corporate vision, economic advising, and business nodsense. The large-scale attempts to automate classrooms analyzed by Noble could be made much less anomalous when articulated with adventures in the testing and textbook industries.*‘

Of course, by automating and individualizing education through programmed instruction, teaching machines and computers, teachers’ labor and other productive processes were microcontrolled. But this did not result in increased productivity or output in students’ mental work. This was anticipated by proponents of automation in education whose intent was, while contradictory, to ameliorate effects of “mass production” instructional methods through the automation of classroom processes. In the late 19SOs, automation was proposed as an address of expanding enrollments and teacher shortages. If the automation of education was only partially a capital-

8‘Douglas D. Noble, The Chswoom Arsenal: Military Research, Infirmation Technology and Public Education (New York: Falmer Press, 1991); idem., “Cockpit Cogmtion: Education, The Military, and Cognitive Engineering,” A1 &Society 3 (Spring 1989): 3-28; idem., “A Bill of Goods,” 1333; idem., “Mad Rushes into the Future: The Overselling of Educational Tech- nology,” Educational Leadership 54 (November 1996): 18-23.

Histories and Hirtoriographies of Technologies 109

for-labor trade-off, then our insights might be better derived from medical practices than industrial practices. Automation and standardization were not contradictory to individualization and education, as noted by cultural theorists and historians. Automation and standardization were not merely forces of control or productivity and indifferent to individuality; rather, in education these social practices were made necessary to the idiosyncrasies of individualization, self-help, and self-distinction.82

Virtual Conclusions: Beyond Teachers and Machines

In Education and the Cult ofEficiency, Raymond Callahan was apt to focus on the administrative management of schools and a wide range of its commodities. In the early 1960s, however, Callahan had the luxury of writing when a frugal management of schools seemed anachronistic; technology could be dismissed as the mere means of efficient practice. It is now overly simple to talk of technology as a tool, or about the vulnerability of administrators, students, and teachers to technical practices, as did many of Callahan’s contemporaries and successors. Curriculum historians have tended to take this vulnerability thesis to extremes: rationality was imposed on an entirely vulnerable corpus of humanistic, liberal curriculum. Con- ceptually, this is founded on the Frankfurt School’s critique that interests are somehow differentiated by “technical, practical, and emancipatory” rationalities. This is the same modem notion, partially popularized by Mar- tin Heidegger, that scientific or technical practices are distinct from artistic or humanistic practicesthat we can navigate through types of rationalities.8i

Yet as Michel Foucault demonstrated, the panoptica typically associated with rational discipline are merely of a variety of modern mechanisms in the normalizing powers of education. The micro physic^" of power, or strategies and technologies of normalization, are not merely produced in one form of curriculum or rationality yet reduced in another. Our most informative hstories of the “School of Tomorrow” are those that, like Calla- han, demonstrate the interrelations among a wide range of commodities.

”On automation and education, see William Brickman and Stanley Lehrer, eds., Automa- tion, Education, and Human Values (New York: School & Society Books, 1966); Luther H. Evans, ed., Automation and the Challenge t o Education (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1962); James Finn, “Automation and Education: 11. Automatizing the Classroom,” Audio-Virual Communication Review 5 (Spring 1957): 45 1-467; James Finn, “Automation and Education: 111. Technology and the Instructional Process,” Audio-Visual Cmmunication Reviea 8 (Winter 1960): 5-26.

”See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 197 l), 308; Gerry Ewert , “Habermas and Education: A Comprehensive Overview of the Influence of Habermas in Educational Literature,” Review of Educational Researcb 61 (Fall 1991), 345- 378; Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Martin Heideg- ger, The Question Concerning TechnoloB, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

110 Histoly of Education Quarterly

But like Foucault, these histories also demonstrate that bureaucracy and technology are inherently central to schooling. These histories undercut ahistorical arguments that technical rationality was somehow an imposi- tion on humanistic curriculum practices, or that technologes are merely instruments toward chosen ends. Administrators, students, and teachers have neither the liberty to shape bureaucracies and technologies as they wish nor are they free to choose to act without technical rationalities. T o defend the “art” or “humanity” of teaching against “science,” “technology,” or “technical rationality” is to take a stand, but it is to also to defend a tired modern, political project of purification. Educational technologies are not merely tools; school premises are not merely pliable instruments of agencies or larger forces; and agents are not merely humans. Historians are now challenged to erase essentialist, predetermined distinctions between bina- ries such as artistic and technical, discipline and liberty, fact and fetish, humanistic and rational, liberal and vocational, or object and subject in classrooms, offices, and

This inventory of commodities and their histories, however comprehensive, is in itself a sign. There has been a gradual accumulation and recom- bination, rather than any processes of elimination, of commodities and their histories in schools. This refers to hybrid variety as well as volume. The agents described here, such as administrators, buildings, computers, custodians, historians, media companies, military subsidies, students, teachers, teaching machines, tests, and textbooks are articulated in strange and mutated forms. Schools are contingent hybrids, but as well, education is a process of hybridization. For now, the collection of histories here will have to be read as a historiography of collectives, and new histories will have to demonstrate how, if, and when we moderate and regulate this process of hybridization. While a focus on case studies of isolated commodities makes for a relatively sound historicism, this focus will have to be diffused through historiographic demonstrations of how apparently ordinary agents articulate within peculiar hybrids.

W h a t historians may gain in analytical purchase on hybrids through theory, they may have to give up in narrative. Or are agency, narrative, and theory more literary than historiographic problems? Can education historians tell, as an entertaining narrative, how the desk, which furnished public schoolrooms for centuries, also furnished the modern, self-regulating, private mind through individualized “seatwork”? This would be the same story of how the blackboard became a “civic agency;” duty at the board was not merely a “pedagogical convenience.” And these would be told in the

‘+Donna J. Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Fem- inism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 @me 1985): 65-108; Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality ofscience Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Histories and Historiogruphies of Technologies 111

adventurous and theoretically provocative genre necessary to depict how psychotherapeutic and technoscientific commodities in the “School of Tomorrow” occupied the bodies, minds, and schools of yesterday. These stories would decode graffiti on lockers and stalls, like this rap limerick, and reveal it as more than students’ or teachers’ feeble attempts at figuring out what’s going on.

Final report from Jocasta: That machine thing was quite a disasta! But now that my Rex Has a program on sex It’s not only better it’s fasta!

Perhaps the adolescent in Peter Hoeg’s story of psychoeducation has more to conclude about the “School of the Tomorrow” than historians: “It is a plan,” says Katarina, “When you look at it with awareness, or start to touch it, then it starts to disintegrate. That is the conclusion of the first phase of the experiment.”8i But what might we do with a knowledge of how young people are compelled and configured to virtually act on complexes and desires still named Freudian, neurotic, and hysterical?

“Fletcher B. Dressler, “American Schoolhouses,” United States Bureau of Education Bul- letin 5 (1910): 45; Variations of the limerick were passed around during the 1960s and 1970s and its source is unknown. Quoted in “Tennyson” to Skinner, 1960, “For B. F. Skinner,” File 60.15, Box 5, B. F. Skinner Papers, Harvard University Archives; Peter Hoeg, Borderliners trans. Barbara Haveland (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 184.

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