Audrey Watters. Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning Boston: MIT Press, 2021. 328 pp.

Abstract

Larry Cuban has spent four decades laying the foundation of the field, starting with the landmark Teachers and Machines (1986), then continuing with Oversold and Underused (2001), and, most recently, Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice (2013).1 In the last few years, the field has expanded in new directions with Morgan Ames's The Charisma Machine (a ethnographic investigation of the One Laptop per Child project), Victoria Cain's new Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (an archival investigation of arguments for and against technology adoption), and my own Failure to Disrupt (an effort to carry Teachers and Machines from the 1980s to the present day).2 As learners and educators across the world rethink their relationship to digital learning in the course of the pandemic, these new entries provide a guide for understanding why the dreams of edtech reforms are so often dashed on the shoals of actual schools. In Teachers and Machines, Cuban frames the history of education technology around the adaptation of new consumer media to classroom applications, tracing a line from radio to filmstrips to television to personal computers. [...]defenses have been mounted many times in the past seventy years in response to teachers’ warnings that computers were coming not to aid but to replace them. [...]Watters's writing in the last decade, this connection between the behaviorist advocates of mechanical teaching machines and influences on the development of online learning had largely been forgotten. According to the master narrative of behaviorism, Noam Chomsky authored a ferocious review of Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior that purged behaviorism from the academy and paved the way for cognitivism, situated learning, and other modern pedagogical philosophies to take over the field. [...]as the story goes, when teaching machines died in the 1950s, cognitivism was better prepared to inform the development of computer-assisted instruction that emerged in its wake.