Teaching Machines by Audrey Watters

Author:Audrey Watters [Watters, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

And it wasn’t just K–12 students who were learning faster. The same article said that “IBM has been able to reduce from fifteen to eight hours the class time needed to cover the opening sections of a course the company gives on the use of its 7070 computer.” The research was overwhelmingly positive, according to the press coverage. “Experimenters also report, as a rule, that students like programmed instruction and think it does them a lot of good.”28 As a rule—that is, there was no other way to think about the future of education than as one that would be programmed in this way.

That teaching machines worked better and faster than human teachers was certainly a story that appealed to the readers of business magazines, which seemed more than happy to repeat a story that derided the school system for its backwardness, its inefficiencies. This stance had found a friendly audience in the business community at least since the publication of Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. (This was the observation Raymond Callahan made in 1962 when he published his book Education and the Cult of Efficiency on the efforts in the early twentieth century to run schools like businesses.29) In a 1958 article, Fortune complained of “The Low Productivity of the ‘Education Industry,’” blaming teachers and teachers’ unions that the “output” of schools had not kept pace with investment.30 Opening with the cliché that education was “big business,” Fortune columnist Daniel Seligman sneered that teachers “oppose anyone who tries to apply business concepts to their work. The concept of productivity—i.e. output in relation to input—is especially abhorrent to educators, possibly because most productivity figures tend to make the education ‘industry’ look bad.”31 Teachers, Seligman contended, were so inefficient, they had no right to demand an increase in pay. Suggesting that in previous decades, schools were actually more productive—in part because of larger class sizes, he claimed that “thirty years ago students were educated more ‘efficiently’ than they are today, i.e. each student required fewer teaching man-hours—and fewer administrative, clerical, and custodial man-hours—than he does today. There is now one teacher for every twenty-six students, in 1928 there was one for every thirty students, and in 1900 there was one for every thirty-seven.”32 New technologies were going to change this, Seligman argued—whether teachers liked it or not. Mocking the teachers’ unions’ concerns, he likened their stance to “the locomotive firemen’s union’s early reaction to the diesel engine.”33

To underscore how educational technologies were positioned to displace teachers, Seligman touted the adoption in 1956 of television-based education in Hagerstown, Maryland, “where 18,000 pupils, from the first through the twelfth grades, are receiving some instruction by television. The instruction is transmitted on a closed circuit from six ‘studios’ in Hagerstown at the rate, currently, of 120 sessions per week, to 450 classrooms equipped with conventional 21-inch black-and-white table models.”34 The cost savings, Seligman argued, indicated that “classroom TV is certain to pay for itself at the very least” by rendering teachers in the district superfluous.

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