Chapter 5: The Machines Go to School

In one of this chapter’s opening quotes, S. L. Pressey paints a technological utopian vision: the potential transformation of education towards individualized learning and the central role that machines will serve toward this end. Pressey, writing in 1933, was witness to vast technological advances after the advent of the Industrial Revolution: the automation of factories and the rise of the automobile. It would be an understatement to say that industrialization had an impact in places like the United States and Western Europe. Along with a different way in which to structure labor, time, and the production process itself to match modernist conceptions of time and space, institutions were also changing according to labor demands of a new burgeoning economy (Marglin, 1974). With the advent of the technological innovation that had to accompany a shift in economic production, for example, this also influenced the notions of what role(s) technology should play in the education of children (Spring, 2011; Tierney, 1993). In the end, machines would be argued as a vital component of educational experiences because machines will need to “respond to the student, and to receive from him certain kinds of information” (Galanter, 1959, p. 4).