The school of tomorrow: promoting electronic multimedia education in the 1960s

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See for instance Cuban, Teachers and Machines; Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology; and Cassidy, Bookends: The Changing Media.

2. Cuban. Teachers and Machines, 5–6.

3. Historians have traditionally characterized the adoption of multimedia systems in the 1960s as the result of key technological innovations and a natural quest for greater fidelity and interactivity. Fred Turner has instead shown that multimedia systems appeared within a specific cultural context, with American intellectuals and designers attaching particular meaning to the technologies themselves. See Turner, The Democratic Surround. For more technologically-focused histories of multimedia see Packer and Jordan, “Overture”; and Rockwell and Mactavish, “Multimedia.”

4. Futuristic visions of multisensory learning were also reinforced by the idea, made popular by Marshall McLuhan and others in the 1960s, that the modern world had irrevocably moved beyond print technologies and literacies and entered into an ‘electronic age.’ See McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; Understanding Media; The Medium is the Massage.

5. On the rise of futurism in American culture in the 1960s see Samuel, Future: A Recent History. On the emergence of futurology or ‘future studies’ as a discipline during the decade see Schmidt-Gernig, “The Cybernetic Society”; and Williams, “World Futures.”

6. For instance, both U.S. World’s Fairs during the 1960s, Century 21 in Seattle (1962) and the New York World’s Fair (1964), contained elaborate exhibits of futuristic, push-button educational systems. At Seattle, the Library 21 exhibit contained a Learning Resources Center with cutting-edge, electronic study alcoves. At New York, both the Library/USA and the ‘School of Tomorrow’ in the Hall of Education contained interactive exhibits of futuristic multimedia learning environments.

7. See for instance Atkinson, “The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer.”

8. Exhibitions and promotional films featuring the home of the future (or ‘house of tomorrow’ or some combination therein) began in the mid-1950s. Notable examples include the ‘Kitchen of the Future’ featured in General Motors’ 1956 promotional film ‘Design for Dreaming’; the ‘Monsanto House of the Future’ featured in Popular Science in 1956 and opened to the public at Disneyland in 1957 (with a promotional film the same year); Whirlpool’s ‘Home of the Future’ at the 1964 Worlds’ Fair’s Pavilion of American Interiors (promotional film same year). See Atkinson, ‘At the Push of a Button’; Corn and Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows; and Heckman, Small World.

9. Thus, it’s no coincidence that many of the electronics firms were Department of Defense contractors. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act, a direct response to the launch of Sputnik, sought to elevate the level of education in America and bolster the ranks of the technical elite. Title VII of the act provided 18 million dollars for research and experimentation in audiovisual educational systems, from 1958 to 1962, while Title II dedicated 280 million dollars for new educational equipment (and remodeling). By 1966, the federal government alone was providing one billion dollars a year towards educational innovation, with 200 million dollars going directly to hardware development. For more on audiovisual education in the context of Sputnik see Siepman, TV and our School Crisis. For more on the National Defense Education Act, see Carlson, Guide to the National Defense Education Act of 1958. For more on the efficiency of multimedia learning within the Cold War context, see Technology in Education.

10. From 1945 to 1950, student enrollment in k-12 schools in the United States increased on par with prior five-year increments, roughly 2 million students. From 1950 to 1955, that number increased by 6 million and from 1955–60 and 1960–1965, each, another 7 million. See Snyder, 120 Years of American Education.

11. The intentions of those in industry were potentially complicated. In the most obvious sense, education was a newly booming market with direct expenditures for formal education in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges increasing from $18 billion a year in 1955 to $40 billion in 1966. By 1975, that number was expected to increase to $60 billion. It’s also possible that electronics firms saw the educational arena as the most opportune place to begin gearing up for a larger communications revolution. This very strategy seems to have been behind a rash of large-scale mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures between the nation’s leading electronics firms and publishing houses specializing in educational material in the mid-to-late 1960s. The largest among them included R.C.A. and Random House, General Electric and Time Inc., IBM and Science Research Associates, Xerox and American Educational Publications, and Raytheon Inc. and D.C. Heath. By 1968 there were over hundred such new partnerships. These mergers, at least for the electronics firms, seemed to be motivated by the idea that a good portion of content traditionally destined for print would soon be communicated electronically. George Haller, president of General Electric, speaking at the American Book Publishing Council regarding their recent acquisition of Random House, told the audience that engineers were now better than publishers at delivering information: ‘We are not interested in the book business, we are interested mainly in the information business… I predict that you people will be chiefly information publishers in the future’ (Gilroy, “Newest Bookman Program,” 40).

12. Even the United States Commissioner of Education at the time, Harold Howe II (1966–68), seemed certain that the electronics industry would soon have a hand, not just in producing technologies for instruction, but in shaping the very nature of education both in and beyond the classroom. In 1966, when Howe announced ‘[we are] on the eve of a major breakthrough in the use of electronic media and their organization into new teaching systems that may change the character of education’ and convened some 700 members from the office of education and the electronics and defense industries for a conference on educational systems in Washington D.C., no educators were present. In fact, when asked why teachers were not invited, one of the planners remarked, ‘education is now too important to be entrusted to the educators.’ See Heddinger, “Will Big Business.”

13. Lieberman, “Business, Technology, and Education,” 185.

14. This thinking extended beyond members of the electronics industry, even to educators. Lois Edinger, president of the National Education Association, for instance, argued in 1966, ‘I rather think the term “classroom teacher” will soon be a misnomer. No longer will we think of the classroom in its traditional box shape. Indeed, we may soon call the teacher a manager of learning resources in an instructional resources center.’ See Edinger, “New Careers in the Classroom.”

15. The idea of the young man as hobbyist, a focus of many boys’ magazines, is important in understanding the gendered dimensions of touting educational technology in this context. Depictions of boys operating various educational media devices in the home were likely bolstered by the notion, long promoted in boys’ magazines, that girls made use of the home as a place for play, while boys engaged, increasingly, in ‘serious leisure,’ hobbies requiring concentration and careful, skilled and technical manipulation. For more on ‘serious labor’ see Stebbins, Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure. For more on boys’ magazines and the promotion of ‘serious labor’ in the home, see Gelber, “Do-it-Yourself.”

16. The cover image was taken by David Attie, a commercial photographer well known for his atmospheric photo-montages – the genre seen here – which he achieved by ‘sandwiching’ and multiply exposing several negatives. Attie worked for many magazines in the late 1950s through the 1970s, including Boys’ Life, Vogue, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Harper’s, but is perhaps best known for his portraits of Truman Capote. See Capote, Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir.

17. Critics of educational technologies certainly thought differently. After all, the very same electronics firms promoting educational technologies as instruments of individual liberation were also developing similar console-centered technologies for the workplace that were, to the contrary, ushering in an era of increased automation and bureaucratic control. The blinking media consoles and personal screens featured so enticingly in depictions of educational technology looked and functioned, to some, an awful lot like computer terminals at banks and offices or control stations at oil refineries, mills and steel plants, all of which were cropping up in these same exact years. Multimedia educational technologies were thus seen by some critics of the period as a means to instead prepare students for a life of systems-centered work, in which, ‘self-directing personalities’ actually conflicted with ‘centralized direction’ (Mumford, “The Automation of Knowledge,” 87). While it’s hard to know whether industry hoped, with the development of educational media, to actually inspire a new generation of self-organized learners or just a new workforce of life-long systems operators, at least publically, even when talking about automation, they focused on the aid to individuals that such systems delivered. In Automation, Education and Human Values, a volume bringing together talks from a gathering of educators and industry at Pennsylvania State University in 1963, Charles R. Bowen, Manager of Project Development at IBM, for instance, chose to emphasize the potential of such technologies to decentralize informational workflows. These were systems built to ultimately ‘amplify and extend the effectiveness of each individual’ because they were ‘tailored to his needs [and] put the capability of the entire system at his service’ (Bowen, 77). In other words, while such technologies connected individuals into larger systems, their promotors ultimately focused on the ways in which they were responsive to individual needs.

18. Moffet, “Computerized School House,” 5.

19. Toffler, Future Shock, 235–6.

20. See Cuban, Teachers and Machines; Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology; and Cassidy, Bookends: The Changing Media.

21. Failure of adoption has been an established topic within the history and sociology of technology for decades, beginning with advocates of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) in the mid-1980s. See Bijker et al., The Social Constructions. With media, in particular, Lisa Gitelman, Jussi Parikka and others in the media archeology tradition have, in recent years, sought to write ‘counter-histories’ that uncover what failed communications technologies tell us about the contested nature of ‘new media’ in the modern world. See Gitelman and Pingree, New Media, 1740–1915; and Parikka, What is Media Archeology. Finally, Kenneth Lipartito, in writing about AT&T’s failed picturephone has specifically discussed the ways in in which cultural visions surrounding technologies may endure beyond their failure of adoption. See Lipartito, “Picturephone and the Information Age.”

22. The emergence of technolibertarianism, or sometimes, cyberlibertarianism, as a concept is generally attributed to Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.” On the historical development of technolibertarianism see Streeter, “That Deep Romantic Chasm”; and Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

23. Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream,” 297.

24. Perlman, “School’s Out.”