The federal and corporate initiative to technologize
education has transformed schools, colleges, and universities
into a new frontier for the computer industry.
While educational institutions have maintained an
equivocal relationship with markets and the state, they
had striven to preserve a simulacrum of independence
until the early 1980s. Then, neoconservative ideologies
and their accompanying discourse on restructuring
education discovered in the computer the ideal
neutral tool to promote, in its virtual clothes, their gospel.
The Clinton administration and big corporations,
taking advantage of the myth of the computer and the
new vocabulary associated with computers, launched
a massive programof wiring schools. The process, still
unfolding at a rapid pace, poses grave problems for
the teaching profession and the role of schools in society.
The author argues that the unethical ways in which
computers force their ways into many educational institutions,
the values they embody, the contexts of their
multiple usages, the hyperfragmentation and increasing
commodification of knowledge that they cause
through online education, the vocationalization of
education, and the atomization of teachers are likely to
shrink pedagogical and democratic possibilities both
at local and global levels. |