Computer Lessons

In memory of Clement J. McDonald, Junior, 1940-2026Beloved husband, loving father, incomparable colleague and generous mentor

A sudden push from the industry,A sudden grant in the fall,By three R's left unguardedThey have entered our study hall.They climb into the curriculum,O’er plans, objectives, and goals,If I try to escape, they surround me,With carrels, consultants, and polls.They almost devour me with data,Hard copy is ever replete,But it beats chalk dust and dittos[1],And the students think that it’s neat -- from “The Computer Hour,” Robert C. Snider [https://archive.org/details/nea-lttr-dpt-ed.-don-senese-nat-tech-conf.-best-8-mar-1982].

Masters or Subjects?

The belief that computers would revolutionize education took root long before the microcomputer era; it had spread rapidly across American universities in the 1960s. The political and technical moment were both ripe: the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs both catalyzed massive new flows of federal money into education, and into educational research in particular. Meanwhile, time-sharing, which allowed multiple users to simultaneously access a single large, expensive computer, made it conceivable to teach whole classrooms of students at once by computer (though this was still very expensive, given the price of computers at the time).

A student studies a geometry lesson on a PLATO terminal [From Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, “A Little History of e-Learning” (2021)]

Two of the earliest time-sharing systems—the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the PLATO system at the University of Illinois—were created specially for educational purposes, and both were backed by government grants, from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and National Science Foundation (NSF), respectively—PLATO would later get NSF money as wel). (

We have already encountered both of these systems in other contexts: DTSS as the origin of the BASIC computer language, and PLATO as a source of inspiration for some early microcomputer games.)[2]

The educational rationales that motivated PLATO and DTSS were very different, however. PLATO came out of the tradition of “teaching machines”: mechanical or electro-mechanical devices that presented a sequence of instructional material to the student, allowing them to advance to the next item only after a correct answer. The promoters of teaching machines (most prominently, Sidney Pressey in the 1920s and 1930s and B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s), promised to bring the industrial revolution to education by automating course material. But unlike the mass-produced homogeneity of industrial products, teaching machines would offer personalized instruction that would move as fast or slow as a given student required, giving each the equivalent of a private tutor. The reach of the teaching machine, however, exceeded its grasp: as one critic put it, despite their revolutionary ambitions, they were little more than “expensive page turners.”[3]

An electronic computer could do far more than Pressey and Skinner’s simple machines, however, and the field of computer-aided instruction (CAI) that emerged in the early 1960s aimed to tap into that flexibility to realize the promise of the teaching machine. PLATO (one of those absurd backronyms, Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was the most long-lasting and best known computer system to emerge from the CAI movement. It began as a simple computerized teaching machine that presented a series of slides to students. But its later iterations used graphical terminals, could move arbitrarily through instructional material, without having to follow a pre-set linear sequence, and could present interactive materials (such as a simulated, open-ended chemistry lab) that were impractical to recreate on paper.

Despite its much greater power, the sales pitch for PLATO was the same as that for the teaching machines that preceded it: to offer each child automatic and individually-paced instruction, accelerating their absorption of the time-honored curriculum of math, reading, science, and so forth.

The Cold War competition with the Soviet Union in this post-Sputnik moment fused with Great Society concerns about failing urban schools to give a sense of urgency to the search for more efficient and effective teaching methods, and also justified the large grants required to fund the use of expensive computer time by undergraduates or even high school students.[4]

The premise of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, on the other hand, was that students would use computers to learn about computers. As we have already mentioned, DTSS was created by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz as a metaphorical open-stack library for computing, and they introduced the BASIC computer language to make computer programming accessible to every undergraduate. Kemeny, head of the Dartmouth math department, observed that computers were already becoming essential to many areas of research, and foresaw that they would become involved in all parts of life in the near future. Whereas CAI enthusiasts wanted to bring the efficiencies of the industrial revolution to instruction, DTSS treated the computer itself as a new industrial revolution which the country’s prospective future leaders (Dartmouth undergrads) would need to understand in order to prevent a technocratic takeover. As Kemeny wrote in 1966:

…all businesses, and most private lives, will be influenced by computers. Whether this is going to be a fully favorable effect, as it could be, or a very harmful one will depend on whether the people who make the policy decisions know what computers can do and what they can’t do, or whether they blindly trust the people who run the machines.[5]

But such an elite-centered vision of computing could not justify the wider introduction of computers to students across all colleges and schools. It reemerged in the 1970s in a diluted form as “computer literacy,” a term coined by one of Kemeny and Kurtz’s colleagues at Dartmouth, Arthur Luehrmann. Leuhrmann teased CAI proponents for pushing the equivalent to “Writing-Assisted Instruction,” when what students really needed was to learn to write:

But there is a higher goal. If the computer is so powerful a resource that it can be programmed to simulate the instructional process, shouldn’t we be teaching our students mastery of this powerful intellectual tool? Is it enough that a student be the subject of computer administered instruction—the end-user of a new technology?

Or should his education also include learning to use the computer… These uses of computers in education cause students to become masters of computing, not merely its subjects.[6]

Hope and Fear

Such were the intellectual roots that grounded the arguments for bringing microcomputers to schools in the 1980s. But they were shallowly dug, poorly watered by empirical fact, and frequently tangled. (We have already seen that as early as 1965, DTSS, designed to give future leaders mastery over the computer, was being used to deliver math drills to Minnesota high school students.) In practice, the motivation for adopting computers in schools was more often emotional than intellectual: dazzling optimism about the capacity of technology to solve social problems mixed with a fear of being left behind and missing out on the future.

Fear that American science was falling behind the Soviets had fueled the initial burst of interest in educational computing in the 1960s, in the wake of Sputnik. By the early 1980s, such worries about losing the Cold War were compounded and even eclipsed by fears of the rising economic threat of Japan. Japanese inroads into traditional areas of American manufacturing strength like automobiles were already alarming enough, but Japanese companies had also begun an assault on high-tech industries, from memory chips to computer systems.[7]

A broad streak of anxiety about Japan shows through in the testimony at hearings held for the 1982 Computer Contribution Act (a.k.a. the “Apple Bill”). One witness called Japan’s rising influence in computer systems “a new ‘Sputnik’.” Al Gore, Jr., then a representative for Tennessee, speaking in favor of the bill, reminding his listeners that “[w]e are constantly made aware of our need to catch up with the Japanese… we have all heard that litany.” This unease at a rising competitor was accompanied by an underlying suspicion that the Japanese were not playing fair. Just days after the hearing, news broke of an FBI sting that caught Hitachi and Mitsubishi employees attempting to purchase purported IBM technical documents.[8]

Thus, an urgent need for “computer literacy” dominated the public discourse about computers in schools in the 1980s.

Sometimes this well-meaning attempt to prepare students for the information age maintained a clear lineage with the ideas of Kemeny and Luehrmann: “Some believe that all children,” wrote Beverly Hunter, a computer programmer turned educator, “…must learn to take control of the machines before the machines take control of them. According to this view, computer literacy is a matter of self-defense.”[9] But public figures like Gore more often brandished computer literacy as a kind of jobs training program for maintaining American competitiveness. According to him, it was the fulcrum on which the fortunes of the American youth would rise or fall:

…computer literacy is becoming a necessary tool as our Nation and the world moves into a new era of high technology… the ability to incorporate basic computer literacy into the skills of our young people could be the difference between a generation of occupational misfits or a rapid growth in productivity at all skill levels of our economy.”[10]

A 1982 New York Times article perfectly captures the hope, fear, and uncertainty that was brewing in intellectual circles around computers in education, and signaled its overflow into popular discourse. Edward Fiske, the Times’ education editor, surveyed the varied range of opinions about how to use computers in schools, and about the urgency of their introduction, from Donald Michael’s book The Unprepared Society (“Ignorance of computers… will render people as functionally illiterate as ignorance of reading, writing and arithmetic”) to Richard Cyert, president of Carnegie-Mellon (on computer-aided instruction: “[w]e tried it for two or three years, but it did not work out… [t]he usage did not seem to be that high.”)[11]

The confusion about exactly what computers would do for students was reflected in schools themselves. Because of the number of computers available, only a small fraction of each student’s instructional time could be in front of a computer, and computer literacy had a clear emotional power: who wants their child to be illiterate? So computer literacy, not computer-aided instruction, became the predominant way of defining instructional goals and curricula around computers and justifying their introduction to schools.

The typical computer literacy curriculum was a grab bag of keyboarding, CAI, general computer knowledge, word processing, and a smattering of programming.