How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000: Historical Perspectives ed. by Carmen Flury and Michael Geiss (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000: Historical Perspectives ed. by Carmen Flury and Michael Geiss
• Stephen Petrina (bio)

How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000: Historical Perspectives
Edited by Carmen Flury and Michael Geiss. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023. Pp. 240.

Exactly how did computers enter classrooms across the world in the 1960s through the 1990s? Were the practices and processes of this innovation similar from school to school or country to country? How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000 is a welcome addition to the historiography of educational media and technology. Across the introduction and nine cases/chapters is a consistent, focused engagement with the historical problem of computational innovation in schools and classrooms. Despite the cultural and linguistic differences from case to case—France, Hungary, Latvia, Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland, UNESCO, the European Community (EC), and the OECD—the book achieves a remarkable consistency.

In the introduction, Flury and Geiss provide a comprehensive historiography of computational innovation in the schools of eastern and western Europe. In the first case, Cardon-Quint documents France’s Le Plan [End Page 1044] Informatique pour tous, rolled out from 1984–88. Historians are hard-pressed to find another centralized case of this rapidity, scale, and scope in the early to mid-1980s. In the second case, Somogyvári, Szabó, and Képes document the decentralized, extracurricular, hands-on agency of students and teachers in Hungary, primarily through cybernetics clubs in Budapest during the 1960s and 1970s. Kestere and Purina-Bieza’s case of Latvia in the third chapter demonstrates parallels with Hungary with a focus on the 1980s and 1990s. Uniquely, the authors employ a nice integration of oral histories and primary records to explore efforts such as grassroots learning “on the basis of friendship.” In the fourth chapter, Cantarell explores how government officials in Sweden during the 1980s and 1990s relied on teachers to take the lead in computational innovation. Cantarell details the give-and-take of the Datorn i skolan and subsequent government-funded computers in schools initiatives from 1973 through the early 1980s. Similarly in the fifth case, Flury contextualizes the to-and-fro among the West German government, private sector vendors, and public school educators necessary to innovation in the 1980s. From March 1984 through 1988, the Computer + Bildung (Computers and Education) support association was an “intermediary actor” (p. 125). Geiss prefaces the sixth case with an observation that “due to the decentralized political structure of Switzerland, there are various historical pathways of computer education” (p. 148). Through a diverse range of actors and initiatives, for instance, by 1980 nearly all upper secondary schools in Switzerland offered some form of computer science (p. 153). The final three chapters develop policy cases, focusing on UNESCO, the EC, and the OECD. In the first of these, Priem documents the backdrop to the New World Information and Communication Order, from the creation of UNESCO in November 1945 through articulation of deep concerns in the early 1970s. In chapter 8, Geiss, Flury, and Guerrero trace the EC’s “intended role for initial and continuing vocational education and training” as interdependent with computational innovation, beginning with the 1973 global oil crisis. In the final chapter, Hof offers a lively interpretation of the OECD’s archives, which “chronicle numerous meetings from 1968 to 1973 that testify to grandiose claims about emerging technologies and the optimism that computers will profoundly change education” (p. 218). The balance of the chapter focuses on the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, created in 1968 to “defuturize” and moderate rhetoric with practicalities and sensibilities.

The book is an important, original historiographic source of insights into computational innovation in European schools. Of course, there remain a few questions. First, it is surprising that librarians and libraries are unaccounted for as common and important actors or agencies in this history of computational innovation in schools. There is no mention of librarians, and the only reference to libraries is a brief reminder that UNESCO “promoted the establishment of school libraries” (p. 179). Even with a narrow definition of “classroom,” historians cannot overlook the library as a space for learning [End Page 1045] about, on, with, or through...