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This is the original review I wrote for Schools Week. However, as my word limit was around 650 words for that publication, and this was around 800 words long, I had to excise 150 words. I hope you enjoy reading this original version, and find it useful.
Here is a very strange paradox. On the one hand, everyone agrees that one of key ingredients for success in life is having great teachers. On the other hand, there seems to be no end of attempts to improve education by people who have either never worked in it, or not understood what they were looking at.
Some examples. In this country we had the Key Stage 3 Strategy. This did not involve teaching machines, but rather took the novel approach of effectively turning the teacher into a machine. Lessons were not exactly scripted, but didn’t fall far short, with instructions such as “When the students have discussed this for seven minutes, go on to slide 18”.
Some years before that we did indeed have a form of teaching machine in the form of computer programs that offered instruction adapted to the needs of each individual, in just fifteen minutes a day. This modern version of the programmed instruction that Watters discusses in her book was all very well apart from the fact that it didn’t work (according to two independent research reports at the time). In any case, the ease with which they were supposed to work was overhyped: the teacher was still required to prepare the programs and check the accuracy of their results.
While Teaching Machines does not deal with the development of “teaching machines” in any country except for the United States (a “failing” which Watters acknowledges), it provides an enormous insight into the mindset (or mindsets) of the sort of people who believe not only that education needs rescuing, but that they are the ones to rescue it.
Those mindsets appear to fall into the following categories:
Firstly, the workload issue. Teachers can be freed from the mundane tasks they have to undertake, such as checking basic subject knowledge. Thus early versions of the “teaching machine” were, really, testing machines. Using machines for such chores would free teachers to be more creative and be able to spend more quality time with their students. This is, if you think about it, a laudable aim. However, it does mean that the “programming” of the machine has been done by an outsider who does not know the students, and whose biases will almost certainly have crept into its design.
Secondly, there is the predilection on the part of some people who have been successful in other fields, such as business, to apply their Messianic zeal to the context of education. (Until it can be shown that amassing material wealth automatically confers wisdom, one wishes they would direct their endeavours somewhere else.)
Thirdly, the inefficiency of schools and teachers. There was a tendency at one point to apply the principles of Taylorism (“scientific management”) to education. There was also the feeling, a few decades later, that American education was failing to deliver the goods. How else to explain the fact that the Soviet Union launched a satellite (Sputnik) before the USA was able to?
This brings us onto a key reason we should be interested in Watters’ analysis even though the focus is on developments in the USA. As she says:
“Too often, the context is stripped from the stories written about education technology, and all that seems to matter is the technology itself. Its history is simply a list of technological developments with no recognition that other events occurred, that other forces— cultural, institutional, political, economic, and so on— were at play.”
Hence in every age there seems to emerge someone like Sal Khan (or Michael Gove for that matter) who believes that education has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years. In Khan’s case, he suggested that video-based instruction could be used to reinvent education, seemingly unaware that pretty much the same claims had been made for film, radio and television.
It seems to me that this is the underlying message of this book, that this kind of thinking hasn’t changed in over a hundred years. Therefore, although the technology has changed, many of the concerns have not. As Watters rightly says:
“To understand the teaching machines of the mid-twentieth century is to understand the teaching machines of today.”
While Teaching Machines is highly readable, it is not without its faults. At times, letter writers “sneer” or “scoff”. How can Watters know? Someone else “crows”. The narrative is not enhanced by such loaded descriptions.
Perhaps a more serious fault is, the sheer amount of detail. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that, in the event of a second edition, the chapters on programmed instruction form the main body of the book while the rest are relegated to a voluminous Notes section at the back.
Notwithstanding these quibbles, this is a well-research and important book that should be on every teacher’s – and Education Secretary’s and tech billionaire’s – reading list.
To read my review for Schools Week, go here: Teaching Machines.
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