Megan Blumenreich and Bethany L. Rogers. Schooling Teachers: Teach for America and the Future of Teacher Education New York: Teachers College Press, 2021. 210 pp.

Abstract

by Seymour Papert and the Logo programming language, where students learn to program computers rather than being programmed by them. She ends, “These practices privilege the much messier forms of teaching and learning, forms that are necessarily grounded in freedom and dignity” (p. 264). But for anthropologist Shreeharsh Kelkar, contemporary technologists are also committed to ideals of freedom and autonomy; it is just that they are based on a different theory of freedom. He argues technology designers are adherents of behavioral economics and its neighbors in the behavioral sciences, rather than behaviorism per se. Whereas the behaviorists want to condition people to behave correctly, the behavioralists see themselves as letting people make choices and nudging them toward making better ones. Kelkar wonders aloud in his writing if this is a distinction without a difference, but ultimately concludes that addressing the ills of technology in our society requires making an accurate diagnosis. If there are important differences between the behavioralist “nudging” technocracy of Cass Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman and the behaviorist utopias of Skinner, then those need to be interrogated in order to resist edtech’s unwanted advances. Teaching Machines arrives in a world where the pandemic has made education technology seem simultaneously more essential and more fallible. Distance learning, as millions of families have learned, can be pretty lousy, but it is probably better than no learning at all. The COVID-19 pandemic may prove a test run for a world wracked by a climate emergency. Schools will close ever more frequently in the face of fires, floods, freezes, and new pandemics and disease events. As the need for more computers, more broadband, more apps, and more connectivity in schools feels inevitable, Watters reminds that there are always choices and alternatives. If we recoil at realizing the deep connections between the edtech of today and discredited views of freedom and autonomy from the past, then we have the responsibility to chart new directions.