Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Innovative Approaches to Research Across Time and Space ed. by Deborah Levison, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances Vavrus (review)

Abstract

will likely claim. Given the powerful role that we saw the COVID-19 pandemic play in shaping technology advancements in K–12 education in recent years, it might be useful to consider the impact that the 1918 influenza outbreak played in this earlier push for technology in the classroom. And if Good had written this book in the years after COVID-19’s arrival rather than just before, she might have explored this issue. Bring the World to the Child offers sound advice to those writing the history of our recent embrace of K–12 technology, as it steers those historians beyond technologies’ nuts and bolts to a focus on the ideological messages that the technology imparts. What readers will get in this volume is a clear, persuasive, and richly documented exploration of the discourse surrounding the large-scale introduction of technology in early twentieth-century American classrooms.