From this perspective, educators should not be authoritativegatekeepers to knowledge but facilitators who help and support student-driven learning processes.

Originally in"uenced by romanticnotions of the child from the nineteenth century, student-centered peda-gogic philosophies tend to emphasize caring for the whole child, with hisor her inherent creative capacities and unique interests, needs, and do-mains of cultural familiarity.

These recurring patterns of problematization are also linked to recur-ring patterns of rendering technical.

In a traditional school, teaching and learning are thus framedfrom the point of view of the teacher or, more accurately, educators andadministrators who work at different levels of educational bureaucracies,while students are wrongly conceptualized as passive receptacles of exist-ing social norms and cultural content.

Traditional approaches toteaching and learning, progressive pedagogic reformers have repeatedlyargued, start with an established body of curricular content and see teach-ers and educational media as mechanisms for transmitting this content tostudents

While it is an oversimpli!cation to group a diverse historyof educational reform projects under the term progressive, there are com-mon patterns that help give the term analytic usefulness

Such problema-tizations of the dominant educational reforms of recent decades, as well asa focus on the seemingly groundbreaking educational opportunities of thenew media technologies of the moment, helped establish the DowntownSchool as a credible alternative to recent test-centric reforms.

According to thedesigners of the school, as well as many of the entrepreneurial reform-ers with whom they allied, test-driven educational reforms had facilitatedpedagogic approaches that were badly out of synch with the dynamic, in-terconnected, and technologically saturated worlds that students inhabited,as well as with the esteemed professional worlds that students were hopedto join.

But as disap-pointments with the dominant educational reforms of the last several de-cades have gathered momentum, new calls for disruption have also arisen.

The latter concern has led someSTEM advocates to extend their prescriptions to include educational ini-tiatives focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, an expansion that hasknit techno-science, design, and now even art education evermore closelywith business and industry.

Fi-nally, the push toward standardization, collective discipline, and STEM hassat somewhat uneasily with the increasing calls for educational institutionsto unleash the country’s creative talent.

Additionally, families and policy-makers on both the left and the right have increasingly resisted the pushtoward centralized curricula and standardized accountability metrics.

Despite decades of reforms like thosechronicled here, the more general political crisis of authority remains aliveand well in the United States, especially after the !nancial collapse of 2008.

As with past educational reform efforts, the dominantreforms of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s do not appear to have ac-complished many hoped-for results.

These changes in the organizational con!guration of urban publicschool systems have been accompanied by a concentration of the curricu-lum in speci!c areas that many policymakers and educational experts deemimportant to national economic competiveness and future job opportuni-ties for all students.

Teachers unions, some families, and some states have re-sisted these changes, but by and large reform movements that began in the1980s have succeeded in instituting standardized accountability mecha-nisms and, to a lesser degree, marketlike competition as school choice.

In doing so, the reforms have rapidly increased the number ofschools and, theoretically, the choices available to families.

As a remedy, these reform-ers called for the creation of numerous small schools in which students,educators, and staff would presumably get to know each other more inti-mately

Schools that failed to meet performance targets were restructuredor closed.

Organizations that were intended to provide support services rather thanbureaucratic dictates

Bloomberg and Klein’s initiativeattempted to hollow out what they saw as an irresponsive and bloatedpublic bureaucracy, which annually serves more than one million students.

According to theseproblematizations, one of the reasons the United States no longer enjoyedthe widely shared growth of the post–World War II period was because theeducation system had become undisciplined and out of step with changesin technology and globalizing economic relations.

Certain forms of gaming have long provided opportunities to fill smallgaps in the day or longer stretches of waiting time.

These different genres of gaming practice also are loosely corre-spondent with different social networks and genres of participation.

Rather thanassume that game genres, platforms, or specific texts determine game playpractice, we organize our description with different practices of play thatemerged from our ethnographic material.

The real-life social ecology of a kid’s life has a powerfully determining effecton what kids get out of gaming.

We also have noted how certain gaming practices can functionas an intergenerational wedge, where parents are shut out from certainforms of media engagement.

The moral panics over games rotting the hearts andminds of children share many of the familiar concerns voiced abouttelevision

Gaming occupies a complicated position in relation to structures ofage, class, and gender because of its status as a technically-driven recre-ational activity usually associated with lowbrow, male-dominated identityand practice.3

Our focus is not on the relation between individual kidsand game content and representation, but rather on how game playpractice and activity are situated within a broader set of cultural and socialengagements and contexts.

Researchers who have studied the receptionof media such as books and television have argued for some time nowthat social context has a formative influence on reception (Buckingham1993; Jenkins 1992; Mankekar 1999; Radway 1984)

Although our focus is still on gaming in the teenyears, we quote older gamers reflecting on their practices growing up withgames or describing the cultures of gaming more generally as reflectivepractitioners.

Gaming practices are extremely diverse in nature and form; gameplay is a complex and multilayered phenomenon.

It is only recently that researchers have beenmoving beyond a conceptual focus on gaming representation to look atgaming practice and the broader structural contexts of gaming activity.

The focus has been almost exclusively on what people hope or fearkids will get from their play, rather than on what they actually do on anongoing, everyday basis

Our work speaks to these public debates by considering everyday gamingpractice and how it is embedded in a broader set of media ecologies andgenres of participation with new media.

More recently, educationalresearchers have engaged with simulation and other state-of-the-art gamesto argue that games provide important opportunities for learning in prac-tice (Gee 2003; Shaffer 2006; Squire 2006).

In contrast to these con-cerns, researchers have been arguing that games have important learningproperties that can be mobilized for education.

Somehave accused games of promoting violence and sexism. Despite very littleempirical evidence that games lead to antisocial or violent behavior,popular perception persists in painting a picture of the aggressive, isolated,compulsive gamer. 1

The growing diversity andfragmentation of engagement with media and communication means that blanket claimsabout new media influences on young people are by definition overstated.

Young people’s landscape of learning and opportunity is complicated by a rapidly changingmedia and technology environment creating new kinds of social divisions, especiallybetween generations.

While some schools are mobilizing today’s technology to connect youngpeople’s digital learning to formal education, most young people are not growing up inenvironments with robust home-school connections, much less digitally networked ones.

Research also indicates that access to school-based extracurricularprograms declined for lower-income families between the mid-1990s to 2010 (Putnam2015).

Scholars have also argued for the importance of out-of-school factors such as poverty,community conditions, systemic inequities, family background, and parenting approachesas drivers of educational inequity (Coleman 1966; Heckman 2006; Heckman and Masterov2007; Lareau 2003; Weininger, Lareau, and Conley 2015).

In addition to rising inequality in the labor market, access to educational and learningopportunity continues to be tied in troubling ways to economic, racial, and ethnicbackground.

The fact that these new communities oflearning and economic activity are not free of the biases and inequalities of the larger societyis not surprising.

The argument behind these workplace- and school-led efforts isthat these high tech and higher order skills will enable young people to adapt to a rapidlychanging and unpredictable employment landscape. However, preparing children forcreative and high tech jobs does not guarantee that those jobs will materialize just becauseworkers are standing by.

Some have focused on specific skills gaps in areas such as computer science andmanufacturing.

College completion rates are increasing for all income groups,but the gap between wealthy and poor has steadily increased from the 1980s to the 2000s,from 31 percent to 45 percent (Dynarski 2014).

In this environment, educational credentials alone can no longer expand opportunity sincethey confer a relative, rather than an absolute, benefit. A college degree is a requirementfor most good jobs, but it is no longer a guarantee.

The labor market for stable working- and middle-class jobs has been gutted,and schooling is no longer a reliable guarantee of economic returns. At the same time, trendssuch as automation and the creative and gig economies create new challenges in connectinglearning to opportunity.

Based on this history, the message to young people and their families has beenthat they should seek college educations and professional certifications as reliable economicinvestments. However, in recent years, pathways to good jobs have become narrower, fragile,and uncertain.

When educational research prioritizes the interests of the academyand of researchers to build their scholarly reputations, it can be conducted with a form of“independence” in which results do not necessarily serve marginalized communities andthose implementing programs and institutions.

Our design principles have a strong skew towardapproaches that give advantage to less resourced youth and families.

Conversely, Illich’s ‘tools for conviviality’ are appropriate and congenial alternatives to tools ofdomination, as convivial tools promote learning, sociality, community, ‘autonomous and creativeintercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment’ (Illich, 1973,p. 27)

Therefore, for Illich, ‘tool’ includes not only machines, but also any ‘means to an end which peopleplan and engineer’ (Cayley, 1992, p. 109), such as industries and institutions.

Having previously realized that society’s ‘hiddencurriculum’ (Illich, 1970, p. 74) manufactures schools in order to introject forces of domination intostudent bodies, Illich went on to insist that, in a highly professionalized and commoditized mediaculture, all aspects of life either promote themselves as educative or increasingly demand someelement of training as a cost of unchecked consumption.

Freire responded by observing that for all their pedagogical valueand apparent historical necessity, computers were not technologically determined to compelstudents to use them in a critically conscious manner (Papert, 2000).

During the early 1990s, as Secretary of Education for the city of São Paulo, Freire recognizedthat computers represented society’s and education’s inevitable future, and thus he acted decisivelyto commit to the infusion of computers in all of the schools under his direction.

Though significant divides clearly exist between rich and poor within theadvanced developed nations of the North as well, this gap in the literature of critical pedagogyundoubtedly results from the differing political and economic needs of the Southern countries inLatin America and Africa, developmental needs which Freire sought first and foremost to address.

Thus, it is our belief that many onlinepolitical and cultural projects today have an educational component as well, and are beginning toreaffirm and reconfigure what participatory and democratic global citizenship will look like in theglobal/local future.

Emergent forms of Internet culture utilizing ‘blogs’ and ‘wikis’ [7] are potentially involvedin a radically democratic social and educational project that amounts to the mass circulation andpoliticization of information and culture. So-called ‘bloggers’ have reinvigorated journalism andpolitics through the manifestation of an efficient grass-roots media force and, in their hands,computing technology appears to be a vehicle for citizens to (at least on occasion) demonstratedirectly both meaningful voice and agency in society

the question remains as to how thistechnology is affecting the lives of students and families in the area for both good and ill.

In the United States, the nation of megaspectacle, schools have been forced to transform underthe pressures wrought by ubiquitous media, technoculture and a computer industry that seeks toplace a computer in every child’s hands (Trend, 2001)

New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio, film, television news andentertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace become spectacles of technoculture,generating expanding sites of information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle formof media culture.

TheInternet-based economy deploys spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and thecirculation and selling of commodities.

In the handsof its many boosters, the information society has often been represented as a sort of cyber-ecumene, capable of bridging differences, weaving communion and welcoming underdevelopedregions into a form of ‘global village’ political economy.

As it is centered on computer, information, communicationand multimedia technologies, the resulting product of this revolution is often hailed as thebeginning of a ‘network’ or ‘information society’ (Castells, 1996, 1999; Kellner, 2002).

It is therefore the utopian challenge to radicalize social practices andinstitutions through the application of new diagnostic critical theories and alternative pedagogiessuch that oppressive cultural and political features are negated, even as progressive tendencieswithin everyday life are articulated and reaffirmed.

Reality should be seen as complex and contested by avariety of forces, rich with alternatives that are immediately present and yet ideologically,normatively, or otherwise blocked from achieving their full realization in their service to society(Marcuse, 1972, p. 13

Technologized media themselvesnow constitute Western culture through and through, and they have become ‘the primary vehiclefor the distribution and dissemination of culture’ (Kellner, 1995, p. 35).

Routinely, culture everywhere is becoming saturated with media, in which many aspects ofmyriad people’s lives are mediated by technology (Stone, 2001).

Instruction is the choice of circumstances which facilitatelearning.

To make this disestablishment effective, we need a lawforbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission tocenters of learning based on previous attendance at somecurriculum.

Neither learning nor justice is promoted by schoolingbecause educators insist on packaging instruction withcertification.

Normal children learn their first language casually,although faster if their parents pay attention to them.

A second major illusion on which the school system rests isthat most learning is the result of teaching.

Countries are rated like casteswhose educational dignity is determined by the averageyears of schooling of its citizens, a rating which is closelyrelated to per capita gross national product, and much morepainful.

Schoolhas become the world religion of a modernized proletariat,and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of thetechnological age.

Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible,we must recognize that it is, in principle, economicallyabsurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating,socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of thepolitical system which promotes it.

The United States isproving to the world that no country can be rich enough toafford a school system that meets the demands this samesystem creates simply by existing, because a successfulschool system schools parents and pupils to the supremevalue of a larger school system, the cost of which increasesdisproportionately as higher grades are in demand andbecome scarce.

everywhere expenditures onschool fall even further behind the expectations of parents,teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discouragesboth the motivation and the financing for large-scaleplanning for nonschooled learning.

It isnow generally accepted that the physical environment willsoon be destroyed by biochemical pollution unless wereverse current trends in the production of physical goods.

Work, leisure,politics, city living, and even family life depend on schoolsfor the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead ofbecoming themselves the means of education.

The failures of school are taken bymost people as a proof that education is a very costly, verycomplex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossibletask.

Neither in North America nor in Latin Americado the poor get equality from obligatory schools.

Most countries inLatin America have reached the "take-off" point towardeconomic development and competitive consumption, andthereby toward modernized poverty: their citizens havelearned to think rich and live poor.

Modernizedpoverty in poor nations affects more people more visiblybut also-for the moment-more superficially.

The money indeed went tothe schools which contained most of the disadvantagedchildren, but it was not spent on the poor childrenthemselves.

“The machine itself, of course, does not teach. It simply brings the studentin contact with the person who composed the material it presents,” andthat material was delivered by the program.5,

“In lesson-learning, the teacher said, ‘this pupil has workedseven of every ten lessons correctly and receives a grade of '6.’ In mastery,the teacher says ‘this pupil has de!nitely caught the central idea.’

Vygotsky believedthat the most e$cient place for learning occurred in this middle area, thezone of proximal development.4+

Vygotsky’stheory can be visualized as a series of enclosed circles: the outermost circlecontains the material to be learned, the innermost circle contains the ma-terial the student already knows, and between the two circles is the contentthe student can learn with some guidance

If students made too many errors, thesteps were considered too large and the program was revised.48

While the steps are small, a skillful programmer could create agradual progression where the steps were chained together to create morecomplex understandings over time.37

Thestudent receives immediate feedback for that response and moves forwardto the next step only if his answer is correct. In this way, the student con-trols the pace of learning and only moves forward only when the content isfully mastered.33

Believing that learning occurs when desired behaviors are systemati-cally reinforced, Skinner theorized that learning could be accomplished byprogramming, where the student is led in a directed manner through thecontent by taking many small steps, each step requiring a response.

“teaching is a matter of arranging contingenciesof reinforcement under which students learn.” 31

focused only onobservable responses that he could empirically record, and he proposed anew theory of how people learned

Shaping,or successive approximation, is a process Skinner developed to encouragespeci!c behaviors he wanted by rewarding small steps toward that action.10

“replaced only by a framed photograph,”

The concepts of shaping and reinforcing behavior byrapid and continuous feedback have set the theoretical foundation in auto-mated instruction for over a half a century.

He also blamed thereluctance of schools to adopt new technology

“myproblem is !nancial, not scienti!c,” ,3 and that a commercial product neededto be inexpensive, adaptable to multiple situations, and require little prep-aration to use.

things most re-peated will be the ones best remembered

Thorndike’s law of recency stated that the item most recently learnedwill be the one most remembered

He pressed for methods to optimize the development ofindividualization and to encourage self-instruction, predicting, “Therewill be many labor-saving schemes, and even machines—not at all for themechanization of education, but for freeing the teacher and pupil fromeducational drudgery and incompetence.” 5

ressey saw the factory model of schools as athreat to the individualism that he and Dewey both viewed as critical.

e constructed a set of simple classroom assessments that wereboth fast for the students to take and easy for the teachers to score.

t teachesus the not newsy proposition that if an animal is deprivedof its natural environment and society, sensorily deprived,made mildly anxious, and restricted to the narrowest pos-sible spontaneous motion, it will emotionally identify withits oppressor and respond—with low-grade grace, energy,and intelligence—in the only way allowed to is.

Thismeant that SNCC had to rethink not simply how it usedprogramming materials, but how it conceived of the wholeprocess and practice of programmed instruction.

But in many ways, programmed instruction was anti-thetical to the work of the Freedom Schools, in which “theteacher’s job was not simply to teach but rather to learn withthe students.”40

In addition to these voter registration efforts that were partof Freedom Summer, civil rights activists sponsored “Free-dom Schools,” a network of alternative education centersthat offered the kind of teaching and learning that the publicschool system of Mississippi had refused to provide its Blackpopulation—an education that combined both intellectualand political development and one that expressly linkedknowledge with power.

The difficulty is increased when they believe thatthey face the risks entailed in civil rights actions.”35

Despite the desperate need, the literacy program struggledto attract participants—not surprising, as adult educationprograms often do.

While the small, step-by-step process is recognizable as pro-grammed instruction, it should be underscored here this wasnot a student working in isolation with a machine, but rathera student working with a tutor.

Programmed instruction, despiteits promises of individualization, still involved programmingafter all.

We might become a brainwashed society of idle andfrivolous consumers.”27

To begin to decide what should beautomated and what must not be automated, and to educatefor a decent society in the foreseeable future.”25

Automation, rather than liberating teachers and studentsfrom drudgery, was reshaping society to one of more finelytuned control, he cautioned.

“There is no righteducation except growing up into a worthwhile world.”22

“But we must be careful to keep reassessing them when,with changing conditions, they become a universal trap anddemocracy begins to look like regimentation.”19

How mightthe teaching machine actually serve, he wondered, to alien-ate and isolate the student?18

But true interest is thelife force of the whole personality, and such interest is com-pletely spontaneous.”13

Although new biologicaland physical technologies could, perhaps, address some ofthese crises, nothing would really shift until human behav-ior was fundamentally altered.

Theworld was beginning to face problems of an entirely neworder of magnitude—the exhaustion of resources, the pol-lution of the environment, overpopulation, and the pos-sibility of a nuclear holocaust.”11

Sir Isaac Newton was able to understand the motions of the earthand the moon around the sun by representing each of thesecomplex bodies by a concretely absurd "abstraction"

In outline, Piaget's theory presents intellectual development asdivided into three great epochs, which (by coincidence or other-wise) approximately match three major periods in the timetable oflife as seen by School.

The workbeing done in the concrete period is that of gradually growing therelevant mental entities and giving them connections so that suchdistinctions become meaningful.

It is impossible not to feel frustrated in thinking about thenature of concrete knowledge by the advantages enjoyed by thetraditional epistemology.

Most of his followers in education set out to hasten(or at least consolidate) the passage of the child beyond concreteoperations.

^ ° f ** «eX a^ *" 7 St ° f US have been taught in school isr^d L nh°87r° Clr ed ^ ^ taUght in scho ^ »dofslnce

The point of abstract thinking is to isolate — to abstract—apure essential factor from the details of a concrete reality.

The supervaluation of the abstract blocks progress in educa-tion in mutually reinforcing ways in practice and in theory.

These mental tools will be as well worn and comfortable as thephysical tools of the traveling tinker;

It also takes the idea of constructingin the head more seriously by recognizing more than one kind ofconstruction (some of them as far removed from simple buildingas cultivating a garden), and by asking questions about the meth-ods and the materials used.

Pointingto the use of mathematical methods that were somehow devel-oped without being taught cannot justify educational compla-cency

Kitchen math points up the same moral; it shows that a largenumber of people have learned to do something mathematicalwithout instruction — and even despite having been taught to dosomething else.

On some level we knowthat if we become really involved with an area of knowledge, welearn it— with or without School, and in any case without theparaphernalia of curriculum and tests and segregation by agegroups that School takes as axiomatic.

whileSchool's self-serving lesson has pervaded world culture, what ismost remarkable is that we all have personal experience andpersona] knowledge that go against it.

School's teaching creates a dependence on Schooland a superstitious addiction to belief in its methods.

Constructionism isbuilt on the assumption that children will do best by finding("fishing") for themselves the specific knowledge they need;

ng."31 Ayres anticipates and worries about the kinds of thinking that, I have argued, characterizeinherently political technologies. It is still true that, in a world in which humanbeings make and maintain artificial systems, nothing is "required" in an absolutesens

ll-known objections to plutonium recycling focus on its unacceptable economic costs, its risks of environmental contamination, and its dangers in regard to the international proliferation of nuclear weapons. Beyondthese concerns, however, stands another less widely appreciated set of hazards?those that involve the sacrifice of civil liberties. The widesp

ne attempt to salvage the autonomy of politics from the bind of practicalnecessity involves the notion that conditions of human association found in theinternal workings of technological systems can easily be kept separate from thepolity as a whole. Ame

Alfred D. Chandler in The Visible Hand, a monumental study of modernbusiness enterprise, presents impressive documentation to defend the hypothesis that the construction and day-to-day operation of many systems of production, transportation, and communication in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies require the development of a particular social form?a large-scale centralized, hierarchical organization administered by highly skilled managers.

If we examine social patterns that comprise the environments of technicalsystems, we find certain devices and systems almost invariably linked to specificways of organizing power and authority. The important question is: Does thisstate of affairs derive from an unavoidable social response to intractable properties in the things themselves, or is it instead a pattern imposed independently bya governing body, ruling class, or some other social or cultural institution tofurther its own purposes?

fferences between Marx's position in Capital and Engels's in his essay raise animportant question for socialism: What, after all, does modern technology makepossible or necessary in political life? The theoretical tension we see here mirrors many troubles in the practice of freedom and authority that have muddiedthe tracks of socialist revolution

the basic case is as compelling as Engels believed it to be,one would expect that, as a society adopted increasingly complicated technicalsystems as its material basis, the prospects for authoritarian ways of life wouldbe greatly enhanced. Central control by knowledgeable people acting at the topof a rigid social hierarchy would seem increasingly prudent. In

ew machines, manned by unskilled labor, actually produced inferior castings at a higher cost than the earlier process. Afterthree years of use the machines were, in fact, abandoned, but by that time theyhad served their purpose?the destruction of the union. Thus, th

y ofhis monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic socialinequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time,becomes just another part of the landscape. As planner Lee Koppleman toldCaro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, "The old son-of-a-gun hadmade sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways."9

Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion thattechnical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself,but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This maxim, whichin a number of variations is the central premise of a theory that can be calledthe social determination of technology, has an obvious wisdom

It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeplyinterwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements ofindustrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citiz

issue isthe claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culturecan be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects,but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power andauthority.

he past work of these authors demonstratedably how every instance of technology and education is entwined with issuesof domination, inequality, and exploitation. This work also fostered valu-able suggestions about how alternate cooperative forms and participatoryarrangements of technology and education might advance social strugglesand the liberation from domination.

In the minds of many academics, the educational applica-tion of digital technology is an inherently forward-looking endeavor wherecritical analyses of the present and/or past are simply not relevant. Thisstems, at least in part, from the fundamental desire amongst most educa-tional technologists to improve education through the implementation ofdigital technology.

Of course, thereis nothing wrong per se with wanting to do good in the world and therebyadopting a positive outlook on life. Yet this positivity becomes problematicwhen it spills over into an excess of belief, hope, and speaking from the heartrather than the head.

There has been growing creep of “rockstar-ism” in education where welook for “the person” to give us “the solution” . . . I’ve answered many ques-tions from audience members with “I don’t know” and “that depends.”People seem to find this unsatisfying. We like our so-called rock stars inthe education and technology field. We like clear answers. And it’s nothealthy for us or for our field.

Of course, a critical approach does not make academic work inherentlysuperior to other less critical work. Moreover, critical studies will never bethe most self-affirming approach to take when it comes to researching andwriting about technology and education—especially when compared to thebreathless adoration of all things digital that media academics all too easilyslip into.

As is often the case with academ-ics, most educational technology specialists are publically concerned, openminded, politically aware (if not politically active), and likely to be ideologi-cally left-of-center. In pointing out that this field needs to be more critical,the suggestion is not being made that a majority of people working in it arehappy-go-lucky, unthinking dupes. What is being suggested, however, isthat many people appear content to turn their critical faculties down con-siderably when engaging in their professional work.

This isan area that still appears to be attracting those who fancy themselves as“boundary pushers,” responsible for “flaming the revolution,” and makingan “impact.” Crucially, these are people who do not appear wholly confort-able when encountering criticism of their boundary pushing and innovation.

These tools are controlled, in their ac,tivities, as extensions of the human organs of work, including the sensoryorgans, and this feat is accomplished by an increasing human underst?n,Ling of the properties of matter - in other words, by the growth ofscientific command of physical principles. The study and understandingnature has, at its primary manifestation in human civilization, the'ing control by humans over labor processes by means of machinesmachine systems.

But it is in the nature of machinery, and a corollary of technicaldevelopment, that the control over the machine need no longer be vestedin its immediate operator. This possibility is seized upon by the capitalistmode of production and utilized to the fullest extent.

The evolution of machinery from its primitive forms, in which simple rigidframes replace the hand as guides for the motion of the tool, to thosemodern complexes in which the ell tire process is guided from start to finishby not only mechanical but also electrical, chemical, and other physicalforces - this evolution may thus be described as an increase in humancontrol over the action of tools.

The fact that many machines may bepaced and controlled according to centralized decisions, and that thesecontrols may thus be in the hands of management, removed from the siteof production to the office - these technical possibilities are of just as greatinterest to management as the fact that the machine multiplies theproductivity of labor.! It is not always necessary, for this purpose, thatthe machine be a well-developed or sophisticated example of its kind.

Less sanguine are thowners of the vast majority of the smaller metalworking firms which, iJ1971, constituted 83 percent of the industry; they have been less able ttadopt the new technology because of the very high initial expense of th,hardware: and thfl overheads and difficulties associatc:d vvith the ~UflWd[l(ibid.). In addition, within the larger, better endowed shops, where th!technology has been introduced, another change in social relations ha:been taking place.

We study more thoroughly the more we strive for a global view and apply this to thetext, distinguishing its component dimensions

Once we establish the relative point between the passage under study and our owninterest, we should make a note of it on a file card with a title that identifies it with thespecific study topic

If we really assume a modest attitude compatible with a critical attitude, we need notfeel foolish when confronted with even great difficulties in trying to discern a deepermeaning from a text.

Maintaining this curious attitude helps us to be skillfull and to profit from ourcuriousity

The act of study, in sum, is an attitude toward the world. Because the act of study is anattitude toward the world, the act of study cannot be reduced to the relationship of reader tobook or reader to text.

Sensing a possible relationship between the read passage and our preoccupation, we as goodreaders should concentrate on analyzing the text, looking for a connection between the mainidea and our own interest.

its focus is fundamentally tokill our curiousity, our inquisitive spirit, and our creativity.

Further, with this approach, a reader cannot separateherself or himself from the text because she or he would be renouncing a critical attitudetoward the text.

Studying is a form of reinventing, re-creating, rewriting; and thisis a subject’s, not an object’s, task.

In a critical vision, things happen differently: A reader feels challenged by the entiretext and the reader’s goal is to appropriate its deeper meaning.

The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves."

the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;

the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge.

They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on "authority" are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it.

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.

Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.

Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.

When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, people suffer.

Oppression—overwhelming control—is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness, it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads women and men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.

Because banking education begins with a false understanding of men and women as objects, it cannot promote the development of what Fromm calls "biophily," but instead produces its opposite: "necrophily."

Solidarity requires true communication, and the concept by which such an educator is guided fears and proscribes communication.

Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality.

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals," are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside"—inside the structure which made them "beings for others."

Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology)of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry.

The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified.

No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.

they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.