A Brief History of Educational Machinery
One revolution after another.
Today’s Sunday Rerun is a piece I posted in late 2014, at the tail end of the great MOOC hype. (“MOOC” was an acronym for massive open online course, in case you’ve forgotten.) As tech companies push AI tools into schools, and teachers and students adopt them in a rush to make education more efficient, it’s worth asking what exactly we’re trying to accomplish by automating the work of learning—a topic I discussed earlier in “The Myth of Automated Learning.”
“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.” –Sebastian Thrun, 2012
Now that we’ve begun to talk of MOOCs retrospectively, the time has come to update my previously published survey of the history of hype and wishful thinking that has for more than a century surrounded technologies for automating education by replacing teachers and classrooms with machines and media. I am adding a new entry to the list. I suspect it won’t be the last addition.
Mail: Around 1885, Yale professor William Rainey Harper, a pioneer of teaching-by-post, said, “The student who has prepared a certain number of lessons in the correspondence school knows more of the subject treated in those lessons, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom.” Soon, he predicted, “the work done by correspondence will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our academies and colleges.”
Phonograph: In an 1878 article on “practical uses of the phonograph,” the New York Times predicted that the phonograph would be used “in the school-room in training children to read properly without the personal attention of the teacher; in teaching them to spell correctly, and in conveying any lesson to be acquired by study and memory. In short, a school may almost be conducted by machinery.”
Movies: “It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,” proclaimed Thomas Edison in 1913. “Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.”
Radio: In 1927, the University of Iowa declared that “it is no imaginary dream to picture the school of tomorrow as an entirely different institution from that of today, because of the use of radio in teaching.”
TV: “During the 1950s and 1960s,” report education scholars Marvin Van Kekerix and James Andrews, “broadcast television was widely heralded as the technology that would revolutionize education.” In 1963, an official with the National University Extension Association wrote that television provided an “open door” to transfer “vigorous and vital learning” from campuses to homes.
Computers: “There won’t be schools in the future,” wrote MIT’s Seymour Papert in 1984. “I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured into groups by age, following a curriculum — all of that.”
World Wide Web: The arrival of the web brought the e-learning fad of the late 1990s, as universities and corporations rushed to invest in online courses. In 1999, Cisco CEO John Chambers told the Times‘s Thomas Friedman, “The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big, it’s going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.”
MOOCs: The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC.” “Welcome to the college education revolution,” wrote the ever-hopeful Friedman in a column heralding massive open online courses. “In five years this will be a huge industry.” The MOOC “is transforming higher education,” declared the Economist, “threatening doom for the laggard and mediocre.” Academics were equally bedazzled. “There’s a tsunami coming,” said Stanford president John Hennessy. Opined MIT president Rafael Reif: “I am convinced that digital learning is the most important innovation in education since the printing press.” Harvard’s Clayton Christensen predicted “wholesale bankruptcies” among traditional universities.
All of these mediums and devices played useful roles in education and training—which is something worth celebrating—but none of them turned out to be revolutionary or transformative. There may be a deeper lesson here, a lesson about how easy it is to overlook the intangible virtues not just of classrooms and teachers but of presence, of bringing students together in one place at one time.
This is a seminal post. It shows how much humans value community over content, or even context. Thanks Nicholas.
This is a classic and well-articulated critique of educational technology hype, often referred to as the "broadcasting fallacy" in ed-tech circles. Carr correctly identifies a century-long pattern: we invent a new medium, predict it will replace schools, and then watch as it merely becomes a supplementary tool. However Nicholas argument conflates technologies of information transmission with technologies of cognitive interaction which is a category error.
Nicholas lists mail, the phonograph, movies, radio, TV, computers, the Web, and MOOCs. What do all of these have in common? They are static, one-to-many broadcasting tools.
A radio cannot answer a student's question. A MOOC cannot adjust its metaphor when a student looks confused. A television cannot grade an essay and suggest a more compelling thesis statement. All previous educational technologies merely scaled access to information, but they could not scale the feedback loop required for deep learning.
AI does not just transmit pre-recorded knowledge; It synthesizes, adapts, and interacts. Generative AI is the first technology that transitions from a "delivery pipe" to an interactive pedagogical agent.
In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom identified the "2 Sigma Problem." He found that students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations (2 sigma) better than students in traditional classrooms. The problem was that scaling one-on-one human tutoring to every student on Earth was economically impossible.
The technologies Nicholas listed failed to disrupt education because they did not solve the 2 Sigma problem, they just made the traditional classroom lecture available at a distance. AI is fundamentally different because it is capable of providing personalized, infinitely patient, one-on-one tutoring tailored to a student's specific learning style, reading level, and interests.
Nicholas states that none of these technologies turned out to be "revolutionary or transformative," pointing to the continued existence of physical classrooms. This relies on a flawed metric for success.
Did the internet revolutionize education? Absolutely. The way research is conducted, the way peer-reviewed journals are accessed, and the way students collaborate have been entirely transformed by the Web. The fact that brick-and-mortar schools still exist does not mean the technology failed; it means that schools serve an intertwined function that goes beyond pure academics.
Schools provide:
State indoctrination and compliance. Very important for Democracy.
Socialization: Forced interaction with peers and one great superior in this case "Teacher" , very important for Economy and integration into work environment.
Custodial Care: A sort of a grown up child care and a third place. Very important for future generation.
Government run businesses tend to stay on despite all the pressure because they are tax funded and they don't have any market indicators for anything that they do .
Past technologies failed to replace schools because you cannot automate custodial care or socialization with a phonograph. AI will not replace the physical building because humans are social primates who need community. However, AI will unbundle these functions, entirely automating and hyper-personalizing the pedagogical aspect, leaving the human teacher to act as a mentor, facilitator, and social guide.
Nicholas concludes by praising the "intangible virtues... of presence, of bringing students together in one place."
This is a valid emotional and sociological point except the part where students are stuck in place, but it romanticizes the traditional classroom. For many students, the traditional classroom is not a place of "intangible virtue" but a place of anxiety, boredom, or feeling left behind because the teacher is forced to teach to the middle of the bell curve on subjects that have zero real life relevance.
AI does not negate the value of bringing people together. Instead, by offloading rote instruction and personalized tutoring to an AI, the time students do spend together in a classroom can be elevated. Instead of sitting silently listening to a lecture (which a MOOC or TV can do), they can engage in debate, hands-on lab work, and collaborative problem-solving.
Nicholas accurately diagnoses the failures of the past but misdiagnoses the future. Measuring AI against a radio or a MOOC is like comparing a combustion engine to a faster horse. Both move you forward, but only one changes the fundamental physics of the journey.