Situating The Question Of Technology In Social Studies

As it is, contemporary culture may lapse into a condition where a surfeit of information is as injurious as the lack of information. (Borgmann, 1999, 231)

On at least one level of experience, information technologies, including the Internet, hypertext, and other form of information delivery tools, seem to open the world to students in social studies classrooms in ways more exciting and possible than with traditional text books and methods of instruction. Edmund Wozniak, a high school social studies teacher in the Calgary Catholic school system, writes in his very thoughtful thesis that the use of hypertext is promising for social studies because it can be a "means by which students can explore the richness of the human experience as active participants in the journey, free to make connections" (1999, 115).

In the following discussion, I want to take a position of some skepticism, not with the expressed hope and responsibility for students' lives as exemplified in work like that of Wozniak's, but with the more uncritical enthusiasm some educators have expressed for the promises of technology. It is not that I think technology can be simply dismissed or ignored, nor that we as social studies educators ought not to exercise responsibility to push or drag social studies into the new millennium (whatever that might mean). Rather, the issue as I see it revolves more around unanswered, and often ignored, questions about what ends of social studies the new technologies of information might serve. In a broader discussion about the new technologies of information, Dreyfus and Spinosa (1998) ask whether there is a legitimate way to "affirm" the new technologies of information, rather than simply assuming that their effects will be all negative and destructive of human community and sensibilities.

The question of affirmation and what qualities such affirmation might manifest in curricular and pedagogic practice is particularly pertinent to the social studies in terms of whether the use of the new technologies can sustain and nurture the development of citizenship. The specific question of what constitutes citizenship and how it may be defined is not a primary focus of this paper. However, from a rather broad perspective, I do wish to suggest that there are some historical, social and philosophical issues that must be considered in terms of the relationships among technology, challenges to citizenship, and the purposes of social studies. In a recent book discussing the meaning of the new information technologies, Albert Borgmann (1999) raises the question of whether we need to hold on to something "real" in the onrushing maelstrom of information. Certainly how we might identify and construct that "reality" in the social studies curriculum is an urgent question. As part of that question, it is important for social studies educators to critically focus on the idea that access to greater amounts of information is not the same as acquiring meaning and understanding (Borgmann 1999, 9). Thus I want to offer a plausible Luddite response to these kinds of issues. I try to do so, not as a knee-jerk dismissal of technology, but to suggest that there are broader questions about which social studies educators ought to be concerned, just as the original Luddites had broader concerns than simply those of the immediate effects of mechanization.

Luddites: Their Historical Context And Relevance To The Present

Often jokingly, we refer to those who oppose the implementation of new information and other technologies as "Luddites." Certainly an attitude and position of Luddism can be one response to the new (and rapidly changing) technologies of information. But to portray Luddites as being simply anti-technology is to miss an important quality of their original critique. In his seminal history of the English working class, E.P. Thompson notes that the conventional view of the Luddites, who were most prominent in the burgeoning north English industrial towns in the early years of the 19th century is that they were violent machine smashers. While destruction of machines in the new factories did occur, Thompson shows that Luddite responses were more a symptom of a deeper anxiety and malaise in the rapid transformation to industrial society.

Thompson emphasizes that the reactions to industrialization and mechanization were less about opposition to new technologies than a "violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism" (1968, 601). Thompson elaborates:

It is easy to forget how evil a reputation the new cotton mills had acquired. They were centers of exploitation, monstrous prisons in which children were confined, centers of immorality and of industrial conflict; above all, they reduced the industrious artisan to 'a dependent State.' A way of life was at stake for the community, and hence, we must see the croppers' opposition to particular machines as being very much more than a particular group of skilled workers defending their own livelihood. These machines symbolized the encroachment of the factory system. (1968, 599; italics in original).

Industrial capitalism inalterably changed the character of pre-industrial communities, the nature of work, and the ways people related to each other. For those of us who have grown up in urban societies of the present, it is probably difficult to grasp at a gut level the magnitude of change experienced by workers in 19th century England, as they were forced to move from integrated rural communities and craft forms of work to chaotic urban areas, and less skilled factory work. As the historian Paul Johnson notes in his study of modernism's birth, existing social and cultural life was relatively powerless in "the march of the machines" (1992, 574). Thus like their forbearers, present-day Luddites would not simply or single-mindedly be against technology itself (the machines, the Internet, hypertext, etc.) but rather would want to address the question of what it is that these kinds of technologies are doing to us.

It is therefore a legitimate social studies question in itself to wonder how the new technologies (in the context of global capitalism today) are changing how we as human beings live together in the present-and how we might and ought to live together. A recent experience brought that question to mind. I participated in an Edmonton-Calgary teleconference on the subject of the Internet and world peace. The conference was organized and hosted by a local high school, and involved high school and university students, parents, and university professors. The underlying theme of the teleconference was whether or not the Internet can serve to broaden relationships among individuals and communities beyond localized borders and create possibilities for forms of communication that would lead to greater tolerance and respect, and ultimately opportunities for world peace.

Now at one level, not having participated in such a technological forum previously, I was of course struck by possibilities for connecting to others, and marveled at the opportunity offered to share stories and interests across time and distance. As it turned out, the discussion was primarily about the Internet and its possibilities and limitations. One thing that was clear was the relative comfort that the high school speakers had with the use of the Internet in their lives, and the fact that it already has become a means of communication for many young people. Indeed, the most poignant story related by one of the students concerned how she and a few others friends were able to talk a friend out of committing suicide through the means of a collective chat room.

Of course this resonated among those participating in the conference as a positive example of the use of the new technologies, and many of us were moved by the student's story and her obviously genuine concern for a friend in distress. But as I was walking back to work, I couldn't help but be bothered by some ambivalent feelings. One was the relative crudeness of the technology: "conversing" with an image and voice on a television screen was just not as compelling as sitting across an actual table talking with someone, and being in same room as others. And, I wondered, would better technology ameliorate that feeling? Would more vivid, more "real" imagery make up for that feeling of alienation?

But on a more disturbing level, I wondered also about the story of the prevention of a suicide, and what that meant. On the one hand, the story could be read as a way that technology creates possibilities for communication and interaction that may be missing in face to face interactions. On the other hand, why was detached discussion on the Internet more compelling than those face to face interactions? Why was the power of Internet communication seen as being more compelling, in some ways, than the story of a student's distress, and the human drama that unfolded? Is there a danger, I wondered, whereby the Internet, as much as easing communication, also makes tolerable what is intolerable, glossing over what is difficult to literally face in everyday life?

I am not denigrating the efforts of the students involved in this story, only attempting to raise the kinds of questions that Albert Borgmann (1999) asks in his recent book on the discussion of the nature of knowledge and reality in the age of the Internet. Borgmann eloquently argues that in cyberspace, information itself becomes a form of reality, but the nature of that reality lacks the power to provide what he calls "focal" relations (1999, 25)-and deeper ethical responses-to things and others:

But while information technology is alleviating overt misery, it is aggravating a hidden sort of suffering that follows from the slow obliteration of human substance. It is the misery of persons who lose their well-being not to violence or oblivion, but to the dilation and attenuation they suffer when the moral gravity and material density of things overlaid by the lightness of information. People are losing their character in the levity of cyberspace (Borgmann 1999, 232).

It is within these kinds of difficult issues that I think I want to raise the ghosts of those distant Luddites. Should we be holding onto something that is being engulfed in the enthusiasm for information technologies as Borgmann asks? This is of course a complex question, and in the space of this short discussion I can only hope to touch on some suggestions. In particular, I want to focus on some possible ways of naming the historical challenges that confront us-a certain "malaise" (Taylor, 1991) in modern technological society, and how in confronting those challenges, technology may not be the answer in and of itself. Technology may indeed exacerbate the problems we face, and cause us to avoid dealing with what might constitute citizenship, for example, as an important goal of the social studies.

The Question Of Technology In The Context Of The "Malaise Of Modernity"

Perhaps even without the challenges of the new information technologies in our lives, or perhaps because such technologies actually heighten the challenges, one of the historical tasks of social studies is to address, I believe, what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1991) calls the deep "malaise of modernity." Taylor provides a compelling reading of the what ails modern society, and he adds to the important body of work about the condition of modern technological life. Taylor's notion of malaise has also been taken up as an issue of disenchantment, in for example, the earlier work of the social theorist, Max Weber (1946). From one perspective, malaise or disenchantment may be understood more broadly as a symptom of the modern age-the age of the proliferation of science and technology. Weber identified disenchantment as a particular mood within modern life. According to Weber, disenchantment arises especially when we think we can know everything, but realize that despite the accumulation of knowledge, we cannot solve all our problems and dilemmas. Moreover, we may even become more aware of the gap between that knowledge and the experienced realities of our lives. As Weber noted:

The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished, one could learn it at any time. Hence it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means the world is disenchanted (Weber 1946, 139; italics in original).

Weber's notion of disenchantment identifies the increasingly narrow focus that scientific rationalism encourages, with its particular ways of thought and the practices that it supports extending further and further to all spheres of life. Other philosophers and social critics have also remarked on the dangers of narrowing the scope of human action to that legitimated primarily by technical knowledge (Barret 1979; Borgmann 1992; Ralston Saul 1992; Gadamer 1996). In terms of the impact of the new information technologies, the cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, an influential software developer, echoes the concern implicit in the idea of disenchantment, when he asks, "can we doubt that knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves" (Joy 2000, 14). He explicitly raises the alarm about whether the speed and development of information technologies is already exceeding our ethical capacity to deal with the impact of such technologies.

Taylor elaborates the shape of disenchantment-or malaise-in the contemporary world. One aspect of disenchantment he attributes to the particular form of individualism that has become prevalent in modern societies, and which contributes to what he calls the "fading of moral horizons" (1991, 10)-a loss of meaning, and especially a loss of connection to things that transcend individual self-interest. Such a form of individualism has also been described in various terms, including Christopher Lasch's (1979) "the culture of narcissism" and Albert Borgmann's characterization of late modernity as being characterized by "ambiguous" and "commodious" individualism, and the "sullen" expression thereof (1992, 2-19). Richard Sennett (1998) speaks of the corrosion of public life, where loyalty to any particular community has been undermined by the transitory and anomic nature of life in the new global economy.

It is possible to recognize how this has played out in education: success in school is conceived more and more in terms of grades on individual achievement tests, and preparation for the success in the world of work. Moreover, the "public" in public education is conceived increasingly rather than as a space that individuals serve, as that which serves individual or privatized needs and ends. In the lives of young people, individualism, it can be argued, has been reduced to displaying consumer brands, where the body itself has become a site of capitalist consumerism (Giroux, 1998). The body politic is in that sense, literally the body, and not a particular social or cultural space that may be immune to both the lure and the vicissitudes of consumerism.

In these examples, what we see of Taylor's (1991) notion of disenchantment about individualism is being reinforced in certain practices, and in particular ways that citizenship is conceptualized in curriculum. Recently I had an opportunity to conduct a small research project for the Canadian Teachers' Institute on Parliamentary Democracy. What I discovered, not unsurprisingly, is that almost all of the teachers who are overtly interested in citizenship, see its qualities in rather legalistic and individualistic ways. Moreover, the inadequacies of citizenship education are attributed to the lack of expertise with regard to pedagogical strategies and content knowledge. What does not seem to be questioned is what Taylor (1991, 16) would identify as the moral calling of citizenship, or, how citizenship may be thought of as an embodied practice in everyday interactions. Thus, in terms of this malaise, it is legitimate to ask why and how increased access to information through technology may ameliorate a limited form of individualism and the need for moral grounding.

This brings me to the second of Taylor's malaises, which is perhaps more directly related to the question of technology and the role it plays in our lives. Taylor claims that what he calls "instrumental reason" has assumed primacy in all facets of our lives, public and private (1991, 4-8). What this means, and how it is played out in everyday life can be understood at many levels. For example, in another work, Taylor (1995) has argued that the very nature of western thought, privileges individualized ways of thinking, further encouraging an instrumental relationship to things and others.

As Taylor and others who write in his kind of tradition of philosophy argue, the problem with instrumental rationality is that we are often caught in decisions, through our positions in institutions, that may in fact do more harm than good, or more benignly, not deal at all with the deeper underlying issues that perversely nurture the feeling of malaise or disenchantment. As Taylor describes it:

But it is also clear that powerful mechanisms of social life press us in this direction. A manager in spite of her own orientation may be forced by conditions of the market to adopt a maximizing strategy she feels is destructive. A bureaucrat, in spite of his personal insight, may be forced by the rules under which he operates to make a decision he knows to be against humanity and good sense (1991, 7).

Educational and pedagogic thinking and practice has not been immune to the ravages of instrumental rationality. In a survey of social studies teachers conducted in Alberta, citizenship was identified as an important goal of social studies, but many teachers see it being sacrificed, overtly or otherwise, to the demands for results that can be quantitatively reported (Smits & Booi 1999). In the teacher education program in which I have only recently began to work, the design of the program, in terms of both intention and structure attempts to nurture an understanding of teaching as practical wisdom. Yet, our students, when they go to schools for field experiences, are faced with acting in ways that require the application of technical knowledge, in the absence still, of a deeper understanding of what it means to be a teacher.

It is likely true that the new information technologies offer opportunities for faster access to information, allow the gathering and dissemination of information through expanded networks, and provide for the opportunities to create hypertextual experiences (Wozniak, 1999). Thus, technology is held out as both a necessity and hope for better education. Yet at the same time, schools seem to be struggling increasingly with issues of violence and bullying; racism and alienation are evident in many locations. These are issues that call us to something deeper. It is not that technology cannot be used in the service of the challenges that face us, but technology does not take the place of dealing with questions of what it means to live as humans, and if we take Taylor's critique seriously, the serious erosion of public life.

The loss of meaning and the fragility of a morality based on individualism coupled with a pervasive technical rationality leads Taylor to a discussion of a third malaise, and that is what he terms the loss of freedom (1991, 8-10). On the surface, this seems ironic, as there is more choice and discussion about choice than ever before: at least in the West, there appear to be choices of what to consume and how, choice in schools, and even choice in health care, as even basic social services are reduced to something you choose off the supermarket shelf, the quality of the product commiserate with what you can pay for it. As Taylor suggests, however, this is a constraining of freedom, not its flowering: the institutions, practices and instrumentality of modern life severely constrain choice about how we should live. In his words:

The society structured around instrumental reason can be seen as imposing a great loss of freedom, on both individuals and the group-because it is not just our social decisions that are shaped by these forces. An individual lifestyle is also hard to sustain against the grain (1991, 9).

Examples of constraints on freedom abound in our everyday lives. Taylor provides the example of living in cities where public transport becomes less and less an option in favor of the use of private automobiles, which in turn creates conditions that severely test choices of how and where to live. In education and schooling, we can see the limits created by the emphasis on tax cuts and less spending with difficulties in schools-and subsequent public dissatisfaction with public education-as increasingly undermining its viability, despite dressing up the phenomenon in the language of choice for families (Barlow and Robertson, 1994). In universities, the normative talk is about business plans and becoming viable through raising funds in the private sector in order to sustain the work that is ostensibly oriented to the broader public good.

The discussion about what constitutes freedom and what may sustain it certainly points to how we might want to address the question of citizenship in the social studies. Taylor is concerned about the loss of freedom, as public participation is increasingly diminished for private pursuits, as people feel more and more alienated from participation in political decision-making, and power, by default falling increasingly into the hands of what Taylor terms "irresponsible tutelary power" (1991, 10). By this he means that decisions increasing fall into the hands of political and business elites, and that such power is not exercised in terms of the responsibility humans have to something outside of their immediate individual needs and interests.

Now of course it is possible to overstate the decline of public life and the degree of disenchantment. However, Taylor's discussion is an important one, I think, for beginning to ask the question not only about the purposes of social studies, but also what citizenship may be, where it lives, and how it may be a meaningful part of social studies learning. Given the terms of disenchantment that are identified by Taylor we ought to ask how social studies can begin to respond in a way that more effectively takes up John Dewey's challenge of many years ago: that education should not just serve public interests, but ought also to contribute to the creation of possibilities for public life (Dewey 1964, 437-439). Thus if citizenship is going to be a meaningful practice, then the question has to asked, for what purposes? To foster what kinds of loyalties? To whom and to what ends?

Responding as a Luddite

It as a Luddite that one might reply that increasing the role of technology does not answer these questions, and indeed to embrace technology uncritically and too enthusiastically may indeed serve to deepen the terms of disenchantment identified by Taylor and others. Bill Joy (2000), the head of Sun Microsystems, asks whether in the near future, humans will be made dispensable even more by technologies that exceed our abilities to control them, or to control them for interests other than commercial gain or to create harm. This echoes Heidegger's notion of technology's power to enframe our lives and actions. Within that enframing humans themselves become a resource, a "standing reserve" for the sake of a world that is ordered by and through the demands of technology-rather than placing what it means to be human in world where technology offers possibilities for certain kinds of living (Dreyfuss & Spinosa, 1998).

Thus before the social studies can enlist technology in the interests of learning and pedagogy, curriculum ought to attempt to focus on that which in Borgmann's terms, may help to solicit "focal practices": practices that enable the exercise of human responsibilities within communities. Dreyfuss and Spinosa ask how technology may be affirmed in our lives, and following both Borgmann and Heidegger, they ask what might draw us "to local gatherings that set up local worlds" (1998, 4), so as to solicit the possibilities for meaningful understanding and practices in our everyday lives.

Implicit in this question then, is an important curricular challenge-perhaps, I would argue, the challenge for social studies. Part of that challenge is to think differently about the epistemological basis of the social studies as they are presently constituted and practiced. By that I mean that social studies has tended to privilege certain ways of knowing. It can be argued that the importance of more practical ways of knowing and attending to the practice of social life has been neglected in favor of learning detached historical accounts, abstract concepts, and disembodied values. Rather than taking us back to focus on our own lives, social studies may indeed take us away from the urgency of that challenge.

Stephen Toulmin (1990) shows how abstracted and technical ways of thinking has its roots in the Enlightenment, which developed into a rather narrow view of individualized and instrumental rationality in more recent times. Toulmin argues that there has been, in the so-called postmodern move, a change in thinking about what constitutes appropriate knowledge for living as citizens. Toulmin writes about the need to attend more closely to what he terms the "oral", "particular", "local" and "timely" qualities of experience (1990, 186-192), aspects of experience that in Borgmann's terms, leads us back to encounters with each other, with events that happen in everyday lives, with our own communities, and with action that can be ethically constituted. Borgmann puts what could be the purpose of social studies evocatively: "to recover a sense of the continuity and depth in our personal world, we have to become again readers of texts and tellers of stories" (1999, 231) which is how humans make sense of themselves and their worlds. And the theologian Hans Kung asks the question of "what, ethically speaking, is holding [our society, our world, our community] together?" (1996, 145).

The way of thinking that is briefly outlined here has not sufficiently influenced our practices in social studies, namely to focus on kinds of knowledge that enable us to develop practices of understanding and building relationships with others, in terms of certain particularities and timely needs. And here it is also where we must ask the question of technology. It is not, as a modern-day Luddite might respond, that technology is unable to serve some function in achieving certain goals of the social studies-goals such as enhancing communication, for example. The danger is that the with its bright lure, technology itself becomes the goal. The broader, perhaps more elusive goals, including citizenship, caring, understanding, and ethical practice are more difficult to address in pedagogical and curricular terms. But as a Luddite would argue, necessarily I think, such goals ought to guide our interest in technology, not the other way around.

The original Luddites likely realized that the pre-industrial forms of work and community were fragile things in the face of "the march of machines." Yet even the acts of machine breaking were not futile in focussing attention on the meaning and effects of those machines on people's lives, and that there are always choices implicated-or ought to be-about how we might and ought to live with technology. If indeed we live in a world that faces ongoing disenchantment in the face of powerful technologies, to aspire to a re-enchantment of the world means that human life has to take on a certain kind of integrity. Such an integrity includes a caring for others and for the world and for the many ways in which we experience connections and relationships-the human and non-human included. If technology can be affirmed in a way that offers possibilities for more ethical ways of being, and for the opportunities to know ourselves and others, then perhaps the protests of the original Luddites can be meaningfully echoed, today and in the future, as a practice of responsible citizenship.

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Hans Smits is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in social studies education, curriculum theory, and action research. He is also Director of Field Experiences in the B.Ed. Master of Teaching Program.Hans Smits is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in social studies education, curriculum theory, and action research. He is also Director of Field Experiences in the B.Ed. Master of Teaching Program.

Is There a Legitimate 'Luddite' Response to Technology in the Social Studies?