History of Computers in Education
The National Education Association, originally, was not supportive of computers for teaching.
Corporations were responsible for flipping the “go” switch to move in that direction.
The National Education Association published an NEA Special Committee on Instructional Technology Report which was presented to their 60th Representative Assembly, held July 4–7, 1981. An excerpt from the report related to the problems of programmed learning (computer assisted instruction) follows:
In its coming involvement with a technology of instruction, the profession will be faced again with the challenge of leadership—by example and by effective communication—the challenge of convincing the public that education is much more than treating students like so many Pavlovian dogs, to be conditioned and programmed into docile acceptance of a do-it-yourself blueprint of the Good Life.
The problems associated with technology, in its final analysis, are problems of freedom and control. Whose freedom? Whose control? As a result of its study, the committee urges the Association to view the problems and promises of instructional technology not as a single issue but rather as a broad continuum of issues affecting all aspects of education and teaching—from purposes to products, from political pragmatism to professional practice. Most problems produced by technology have to do with the human use of human beings. In his book, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Doubleday: New York, 1978), William Barrette observes that— Human creativity exceeds the mechanisms it invents, and is required even for their intelligent direction…. If we try to flee from our human condition into the computer we only meet ourselves there.