In 1932, eight years after Pressey had taken his automated teaching machine public and after its production had been halted by his manufacturing partner, he had grown frustrated.
“Pressey blasted education as “the one major activity in this country which is still in a crude handicraft stage.”” (Teaching Machines by Watters, p. 59)
He went on to predict that an industrial revolution in teaching was coming soon.
Don’t that quote and that sentiment feel like they’ve been ripped from today’s headlines?
Certainly, it’s a common complaint to despair about the glacial rate of change in education. (And, it turns out that this has been common for almost a century.) Teachers undoubtedly resist change—who doesn’t? But could it be that they do so because they understand child psychology and learning well enough to know that a machine can’t capture what it is that really goes on in the learning process?
Maybe there is a place for automated teaching machines, but maybe they could only be beneficial to the child if the whole teaching/learning/classroom enterprise were upended. And since it’s the rare teacher that is given the time and resources to redesign his/her classroom in toto, it shouldn’t be surprising that teaching machines haven’t achieved spectacular success rates.
What might be done in today’s schools to pave the way for integration (and the success of) digital teaching tools? Can anything be done? Does it involve total change?
