Teaching Machines

Abstract

TEACHING MACHINES: The History of Personalized Learning by Audrey Watters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. 313 pages. Hardcover; $34.95. ISBN: 9780262045698. *Teaching Machines, by freelance writer, researcher, and technology commentator Audrey Watters, is a history framed by a critical rallying cry. The main body of the book is a history of the development and demise of "teaching machines" (mechanical devices for self-paced, programmed instruction) from the 1920s to the 1960s. It attends closely to the extent and limits of the influence of B. F. Skinner (and his forerunner Sidney Pressey), the role of commercial interests and processes, the development of a receptive social imaginary through popular media, the inconclusive nature of empirical findings about the learning that resulted, the eclipse of the mid-century teaching machine by programmed learning in book form, and the rise of computers. This account by itself might seem a little arcane. It is, however, given added heft by a framing argument that ties the history of teaching machines to present-day trends, and critiques some common myths regarding the history of educational technologies that are used to sell current technological options. This framing argument contends, on the one hand, that the "Silicon Valley mythology" (p. 249), regarding education's digital future, rests on misinformation about the past, and, on the other hand, that current digital developments have more continuity with the behaviorist and totalitarian impulses of that past than is commonly admitted. *Concerning the former point, Watters points to a common narrative purveyed by figures such as Sal Khan and Bill Gates that presents education as beset by a static factory model rooted in the nineteenth century and buttressed by resistance to change on the part of Luddite educators. The solution then comes in the form of commercially sourced digital tools that now offer revolutionary degrees of individualization and access to learning. Watters's account undermines both halves of this story. She marshals a substantial body of evidence to show that education has been far from static over the past century, that technological innovations designed by educators regularly stalled due to inertia and disorganization on the part of the business world, and that the rhetoric of revolutionary individualization and personalization of learning has been the stock-in-trade of purveyors of a long string of new educational technologies but has also consistently fallen short in practice. A generous amount of space is devoted to B. F. Skinner's bouts of epistolary fury directed at his business partners who stalled development of his teaching machines until their moment had passed. More significantly, Watters makes clear that the recurring claim of individualization came within a recurring and expanding envelope of standardization. Proponents of teaching machines made much of the potential for individualized instruction, understood as the capacity for learners to proceed at their own pace. Those same learners were expected to follow programmed sequences, assemble predetermined atoms of knowledge, prepare for standardized tests, and submit to a rather deterministic process of behavioral manipulation. The talk of individualization may perhaps have been sincere, but it amounted in the end to something comparable to today's processes of "personalizing" your smartphone by choosing the same device as millions of others in one of a handful of colors, or perhaps clicking on the same online instructional video, framed by the same perspective, as everyone else. In the meantime, the appeal to individualization helped to shift product. *The suggestion of contemporary parallels points to the second part of the book's framing agenda, which claims that teaching machines were not just a curious episode that met its demise with the rise of computing. Watters points out that claims to revolutionary breakthroughs in education through technology commonly end up looking oddly conservative. Dreams of technocratic learning and robot teachers in the 1950s and 1960s still placed the robots in front of classrooms with rows of chairs in which students answered multiple-choice questions. Watters suggests that contrary to some tellings of the story, the teaching machines of the day did not give way to computers so much as help to establish assumptions about programmed learning rooted in behavioral manipulation, atomization of content, and linear progress that continue to inform today's digital educational technologies. The commercial involvement in all of this is, moreover, far from disinterested, with considerable research and design acumen going into the creation of digital products that reinforce behaviors favorable to those who make their living from eyeballs remaining on webpages and apps. After a chapter starkly comparing the Skinnerian vision of education based on control through behavioral engineering to protests from figures such as Freire and Chomsky in the name of freedom, Watters wonders aloud in the concluding chapter whether the quaint teaching machines of yore were just setting us up for a larger-scale loss of freedom in the name of surveillance capitalism, a loss sold under the aegis of the latest reiteration of educational utopia based on individualization. *The book is engaging, well written, and highly readable. Its deconstruction of the popular narratives about technology and education that it targets is persuasive, patient, and useful. For a book that ultimately has some larger points to make, it narrates the history carefully and in a measured tone. The concluding argument about the continuities between Skinnerian teaching machines and the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism rings true, but comes as a bigger leap given that all of the detail is focused on the decades between 1920 and 1970, after which we race somewhat headlong to the present in a welter of telling one-liners from various authors. That there are family resemblances between now and then seems undeniable based on the evidence presented, but detailed lines of descent are less clearly established. One also wonders whether the key opposition of totalitarian control versus radical individual freedom is quite adequate to do justice to the landscape. The closing sections are a little broad-brush, but certainly well worth pondering. The book is recommended reading for anyone interested in technology's relationship to society and education, and for anyone who imagines that educational technologies are just tools for making schools better. *Reviewed by David I. Smith, Professor, Director, Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.