EDUCATIONAL THEORY Winter 1988, Vol. 38, No. 1 0 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Teaching a Nineteenth-century Mode of Thinking through a Twentieth-century Machine

By C. A. Bowers

The use of microcomputers in the classroom involves a profound irony that has escaped the attention of those who write the educational software programs and the monographs that attempt to explain the uses and limitations of the new technology. The irony is that the software programs for these twentieth-century machines reinforces a nine- teenth-century view of knowledge and the individual. A probable explanation for this oversight, which can hardly be viewed as insignificant, is that the people who produce the programs and the literature on the educational uses of microcomputers have unquestionably accepted an interacting set of myths about the nature of technology, knowledge, and the individual. As these myths underlie the taken-for-granted assump- tions that guide most educational thought and practice, it is not being suggested here that the advocates of educational computing are more controlled by these cultural myths than others. The basic problem, aside from the personal one facing program writers who do not recognize how their own thought process is culturally conditioned, is that the unique power and versatility of the microcomputer will further bind students to a nineteenth-century pattern of thinking and set of assumptions that are now being questioned in many areas of the academic world.

In order to put the problem in clearer focus it is necessary to recognize that there are three general areas of expertise regarding the development and use of microcomputers in education. These include the development of the computer languages that run the software programs, the writing of the software programs that perform specific educational tasks, and what can, for lack of a better phrase, be referred to as the nontechnical aspects of educational computing. In terms of this tripartite division of the territory, the latter area includes understanding how the educational uses of microcomputers interact with and influence the cultural patterns that constitute the environment of the classroom. These include the patterns of social interaction, the legitimation of what constitutes knowledge, the political ideology reinforced by the content of the educational experience, and how educational computing in the classroom mediates and transforms the cultural transmission process. Although this third area of expertise, which really has to do with the cultural, educational, gender, and political implications of microcomputers, is the most complex and difficult one of the three, it is, interestingly enough, nearly totally ignored in the professional journals dealing with educational computing. But that is the subject of another article. Our purpose here is to stress the point that the following analysis of how current educational software reinforces a nineteenth-century mode of thinking is only part of an area of inquiry that should be an integral part of “computer literacy.”

The argument that the use of the microcomputer shapes the student’s way of thinking, as opposed simply to facilitating it, is contingent upon settling the issue of whether technology is a neutral tool. The familiar aphorism “garbage in, garbage out” that one continually hears in discussions about the influence of microcomputers succinctly represents the orthodoxy held by most educators that microcomputers are a neutral technology. The microcomputer, according to this view, simply facilitates and expands our symbol manipulation capacity, and it does it with a degree of speed and reliability that we cannot match. As we program these machines, we control them in much the same way we control how the pencil is to be used (an analogy that educators like to make). This is a totally erroneous view of microcomputers and, for that matter,

Correspondence: Division of Educational Policy and Management, College of Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1215.

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of the neutral nature of pencils; in explaining why this view does not hold up we can begin to see how the educational uses of microcomputers reinforce a particular pattern of thought - one that is based on the Cartesian world view that is now being challenged by people working in the sociology of knowledge and critical hermeneutics.’

The easiest way to understand the nonneutrality of a technology is to follow Don Ihde’s suggestion that we consider how experience is mediated by the technologies we use. Simply put, he asks us to consider the technology (i.e., microcomputers) as part of the field of our experience and to pay close attention to what aspects of experience are selected, amplified, and reduced through interaction with various forms of technology.2 How the use of a particular technology mediates and transforms the nature of experience can be understood, to start with the simplest example, by looking at what aspects of experience are amplified and reduced when we use a pencil. Use of a pencil amplifies the ability to express our thoughts in written form, and because of the characteristics of this technology we have the time to reformulate our thoughts in the process of writing them down. By facilitating written expression the pencil amplifies a whole series of characteristics that have social, cultural, and political consequences: a privatized form of communication, a decontextualized form of thought, creation of a text that takes on an independent existence thus allowing for critical analysis, and communication with an anonymous p ~ b l i c . ~ At the same time, the use of the pencil reduces (selects out) those aspects of experience connected with sensory awareness and tacit forms of understanding. In the larger scheme of things, the pencil amplifies those aspects of experience that foster individualism, analytic thought, and reification of the word; but it reduces the human capacities that are expressed in oral traditions: context-specific sources of meaning, the full use of all the senses, and the spoken word in an ongoing process of negotiating meanings with others.

To take another example, we can ask what the use of the telephone amplifies and what it reduces. It is a powerful technology for communicating voice over great distances, and as it reduces other aspects of the communication process it sharpens our tendency to listen carefully. But it reduces our ability to use context, body language (including facial expression) as part of the message system. In learning to think of how different technologies - automobile, fork, book, calculator, flute, etc. - amplify certain aspects of experience while reducing others, it becomes less strange to ask what a microcomputer, given the current state of software, amplifies and reduces. But in order to understand the educational significance of this line of questioning, we need to put in focus a more complex view of experience - one that takes account of the cultural aspects. Thus before we can examine what the use of microcomputers amplifies and reduces we need to situate this technology in terms of how culture is transmitted and experienced in the classroom. This will enable us to see what is being amplified and reduced and how this selection process (which involves the microcomputer acting on the student) reinforces a nineteenth-century mode of thought.

Briefly, all aspects of human experience are influenced and sustained by culture: technologies, customs and norms, political and economic institutions, and so forth. But the aspect of culture most pertinent to understanding the amplification-reduction characteristics of microcomputers is the symbolic. Although not all aspects of culture have a symbolic dimension, the aspects most important to our discussion have to do with the language systems - verbal and nonverbal -that provide the information codes for thinking and a ~ t i n g . ~ In learning to speak we acquire the conceptual categories and assumptions of our language community, and through the ongoing conversations with others the culturally derived patterns that govern interactions, purposes, and

1. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New

2. Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis (Boston: 0. Reidel, 1979), 56-57. 3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technology of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982),

4. Ward H. Goodenough, Culture, Language, and Society (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/

Foundation for Design (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1986).

78-108.

Cumrnings, 1981), 66.

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A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MACHINE 43

achievement are continually reinforced and modified in minor ways. The key point here is that language, as Claus Mueller put it, “is a repository of cultural traditions’? it provides the conceptual basis for our interpretations, reflective thought, imagination, and thus choices and behaviors. There are three implications of this statement that need to be made explicit: first, knowledge is an interpretation based on the conceptual categories we unconsciously acquire when we become members of our language community; second, most of our knowledge of how to think and act is based on tacit understandings, where performance and context are more critical than our ability to make explicit the knowledge we possess;6 third, language provides the symbolic (metaphorical) framework that influences human thought and actions - including the creation of institutions and material objects.’ The implication of this last point is that everything that is humanly created has a history and that it embodies in the present elements of the symbolic order out of which it originated.

By emphasizing the symbolic aspects of culture we can more easily view the classroom as a complex language environment and thus see more clearly that what goes on in this environment is the transmission of the conceptual patterns and information codes of the dominant culture. The transmission is exceedingly complex and includes talk, reading, use of space and time as an information code, regulation of patterns of social interaction, and use of body language. Part of the transmission process is explicit (the lesson, textbooks, the point the teacher wants to make, the issues that are argued, and so forth), but much of the culture is learned and reinforced at the tacit level where neither teacher nor students are fully aware of the cultural patterns and assumptions that are being learned.

By considering the classroom in terms of a complex language environment we have avoided the mythic starting point that the classroom is made up of autonomous, self-directing, and rational individuals, some of whom find their way over to the microcomputer for the purpose of using the data base as a source of objective information or the word processor to express their individual thoughts. In the classroom both teacher and students operate within the limits of language; that is, imagination, reflection, intuition, and interpretation are constrained by the conceptual categories of language. But these limits are also the basis for new possibilities.

Having situated the student and the microcomputer within the context of the complex language environment that characterizes a classroom, we can now turn to the question of how the microcomputer mediates and shapes what goes on in the cultural transmission process. We could discuss the amplification-reduction character- istics of word processing or of LOGO, but the use of a data base like NewsWorks will serve as a better example of how knowledge is structured through the characteristics of the technology and, in turn, how the computer technology reinforces a particular pattern of thinking.

What the software amplifies is clearly stated by the creators of NewsWorks:

By using data bases in the classroom, students develop critical thinking skills and improve their ability to use information retrieval systems. Using data base samples encourages students to: - compare and construct data - determine cause and effect relationships over time - make inferences from data - form and test hypotheses made from data analysis - predict historical and economic trends from data - develop inductive and deductive logic by using data - improve research skills.8

5. Claus Mueller, The Politics of Communication (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 15. 6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1976), 64. 7. Donald Schon, “Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem-Setting in Social Policy,”

in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortny (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 8. NewsWorks: The Teacher’s Guide (New York: Newsweek Publishing, 1985), 1.

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This is indeed an impressive set of claims, and because the assumptions about the nature of knowledge and how we think that are embedded in this statement are so widely shared by software program writers and teachers, few are likely to see how the use of this technology will shape the student's way of thinking.

At this point in the argument some readers are likely to object that it is unfair to criticize either the content of an instructional program or the promises made on its behalf without taking account of the classroom context in which it is used. Although a few teachers may understand the hermeneutic idea of interpretation that language is not a "conduit" for transmitting objective information and that learning is not an individually centered activity, most teachers will bring a natural attitude to educational computing that will correspond to the Cartesian tradition of rationalism that still dominates, according to Terry Winogard and Fernando Flores, the field of c~mputing.~ The literature on educational computing, it should be noted, further reinforces the Cartesian view of knowledge by providing only articles that deal with the procedural problems of uslng instructional software programs in the classroom. Readers will not find there a discussion of the metaphorical nature of thought, how educational computing reinforces a masculine mode of thinking, or the difference between analogue and digital knowledge. Instead, the cultural myth that reduces knowledge to information is contin- ually reinforced.

When Newsworks, or any other data base, is used in a classroom where the teacher is uninformed about the relevant epistemological issues, the software program will reinforce the epistemological orientation of the people who write it. In the case of News Works, the selection and amplification process represents knowledge as discrete bits of information (facts) in a manner that leads to objective conclusions (truth). The data base will also amplify the ability to collect, store, and retrieve data that can be observed and measured. The data base presents a decontextualized and thus abstracted representation of what the words on the monitor signify. Thus the technology further strengthens a longstanding cultural tradition of accepting the printed word (and mea- surable data) as an accurate presentation of reality and language as a neutral conduit for the transmitting of information.

We should now turn to the aspects of experience that do not get transmitted as the students sit in front of the microcomputer manipulating the data files. As an algorithmic system, it is incapable of being programmed for forms of knowledge that cannot be made explicit and organized into discrete components and that have operational rules which cannot be formally represented.'' Thus the machine in front of the student cuts out of the communication process (the reduction phenomenon) tacit- heuristic forms of knowledge that underlie commonsense experience, the awareness that knowledge is an interpretation influenced by the conceptual categories embedded in the language of the person who discovered or established the knowledge as fact, the recognition that language and thus the foundations of knowledge itself are meta- phorical, and finally that the "data" have a history. The binary logic that so strongly amplifies the sense of objective facts and data-based thinking serves, at the same time, to reduce the importance of meaning, ambiguity, and perspective. The sense of history and the cultural relativism of the student's interpretative framework are also

In effect, the use of the computer data base mediates the cultural transmission processes that go on between the student and the social world. This can, of course, be said of all technologies; for example, eyeglasses mediate our relationship to the environment in a manner that amplifies our ability to see more clearly but does not strengthen our acuity in areas of taste, smell, and sound. But what is important for

put out of focus.

9. Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognifion, 14-26. 10. A discussion of how problem solving is based on tacit and heuristic forms of understanding

and how this form of knowledge cannot be programmed is contained in Mind over Machine: The Power of Human lntuifion and Experfise in the Era of the Computer, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus (New York: Free Press, 1986).

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educators to consider is the pattern of thought, and image of individualism, that is reinforced by what the microcomputer amplifies and reduces in the cultural transmission process. The claims made in behalf of Newsworks, which are also used to justify other software programs, involve assumptions about the nature of knowledge which are given further legitimacy as part of the positivistic tradition of thinking that had its roots in the nineteenth century. At that time Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim (two French sociologists) were helping to broaden the conceptual basis for a positive form of knowledge beyond the scientific community that was already well entrenched. The scientific method provided them a powerful model for how to think about the social world, hence the concern with reducing social experience to the observable and measurable and with examining the variable relationships. The emphasis on objective knowledge, as well as the tendency to interpret cultural differences within an evolutionary framework, led to a view of knowledge that is essentially identical to the position contained in the quotation from NewsWorks.

By amplifying a nineteenth-century view of knowledge the data base reduces (selects out) the elements of understanding that are associated with developments in the twentieth century. These include an understanding that what is experienced as “real” is socially constructed” and that our interpretations are influenced by the conceptual categories embedded in our natural language. This view of language forces a recognition of the relativism of the interpretative framework used to explain what the “data” mean. In recent years there has also been a growing recognition that the problem of meaning has been put out of focus by the emphasis on an objective world. The problem of meaning (i.e., how the individual interprets and gives meaning to daily life) is fundamental to whether students can make generalizations about other cultures, even when the generalizations are based on “objective data.” Generalizations about other cultural groups ignore the taken-for-granted interpretative frameworks of the student, the data collector (often hidden from consideration), as well as the people who are the objects of the generalizations. Lastly, there have been important devel- opments in understanding the difference between explicit and implicit forms of knowl- edge. Recent advances in anthropology, philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge have provided us a way of recognizing the knowledge we have difficulty making explicit because of its taken-for-granted nature.I2 This is knowledge that we learn from others in contexts and is basic to successful cultural performances (when it is appropriate to tell a joke, how to adjust our sense of space in accordance with changes in context, and so forth). It also provides a secure taken-for-granted world of shared patterns that allows us to make explicit and reflect upon specific areas of cultural activity.

The nineteenth-century view of knowledge that is amplified in the Newsworks data base, as well as in other educational software programs that provide factual information for reasoning, creates a number of educational problems that are related to the mythic view of objective knowledge. One problem relates to the view of individualism that is reinforced by the nineteenth-century convention that separated the knower from the known. The view of thinking as information processing seems to fit nicely with the liberal view of the individual as an autonomous, self-directing being. To insure that self- direction is based on a reflective process, it is essential, according to this view, that the individual be given access to all the facts. Thus the capacity of the microcomputer to store, manipulate, and retrieve data makes it the ideal educational tool for facilitating the individual’s rational capacity for self-direction. The only problem with this view of the individual is that it is based on a number of misconceptions that go far back into Western thought. For our purposes, we can simply point out that if people speak a language, they will think within the conceptual categories and assumptions that underlie the culture’s world view and thus cannot be considered as autonomous or entirely self-

11. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City,

12. Mary Douglas, lmplicit Meanings (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Richard Rorty, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967). esp. the chapter “Society as Objective Reality.”

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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directing. But more important than these problems, which have to do with reinforcing a mythic view of the individual, is the civic issue of how to educate in a manner that strengthens students’ ability to recognize that they are members of a larger social group and that this membership will provide the cultural resources that will be individualized as part of their own personal growth. This recognition also carries with it definite shared responsibilities for strengthening the cultural resource base. Learning about self as part of a “community of memory,” to use Robert Bellah’s phra~e, ’~ is undermined by the view of the autonomous individual who only needs objective information in order to be rational.

Another major educational problem raised by the use of the microcomputer in the classroom has to do with the role of the teacher. The data base, for example, far exceeds the teacher’s capacity to provide relevant and accurate information. The use of other software programs, which rely upon a degree of expertise that few teachers can match, makes the teacher’s role even more ambiguous. As educational computing becomes more widespread, the question of what the teacher can contribute to the educational process, beyond providing guidance in the use of the technology, becomes a more paramount concern. If we stay with the objective form of knowledge that fits a computer-based system of instruction, the teacher’s role will be that of a monitor of student behavior and a technical advisor. But if we take seriously a twentieth-century view of knowledge - that facts represent the objectification of somebody’s interpre- tation, that interpretations are influenced by the conceptual guidance system of a culture, that objective knowledge is about a world of events and objects that become more fully understood as we trace their historical development, that language and thought are metaphorical in nature, that explicit-calculating forms of knowledge are quite different from the tacit-heuristic forms of understanding and problem solving, and that the structure of knowledge and individual understanding is shared and filtered by what individuals take for granted -then it becomes possible to recognize the unique contribution that only the teacher can make to the educational process.

The teacher cannot match the machine when it comes to the tireless reproduction of factual information or the knowledge base that can be made available through the microcomputer. But only the teacher can amplify those aspects of the cultural trans- mission process that are reduced by the selective characteristics of the microcomputer. This involves restoring to teachers responsibility for recognizing when to intervene in the educational process by clarifying the conceptual problems that arise from meta- phorical thinking, by pointing out that the objective knowledge reflects somebody’s interpretative framework and that this framework must be understood in terms of the underlying cultural assumptions, by making explicit the student’s taken-for-granted assumptions and how these assumptions influence understanding, by guiding the student to think in terms of historical continuities and transformations, and, finally, by urging students to check the more abstract and context-free forms of knowledge (data, generalizations, etc.) against their own commonsense forms of understanding. This is the aspect of the cultural transmission process that cannot be programmed because it involves paying attention to what the student and program writer are imposing upon the data, the context within which learning occurs, and making the conceptual con- nections between what is being learned and other parts of the curriculum.

In effect, a twentieth-century view of knowledge involves using the microcomputer as a powerful and legitimate tool of the teacher and students. But it means subordinating the machine to the complexity of the human experience rather than amplifying only those aspects of experience that fit the logic of the machine.

13. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 153.

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