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Introduction to Issue #18

In New York over the past year, the school board has been soliciting various corporations to revolutionize the public school system. Its solutions? Not increased teacher pay, or lower classroom size, or anything nearly so mundane as adding desks: The school board wants a commercial web portal and laptops for all, fourth grade on up.

The plan, as you might imagine, is blatantly profit-driven. The Board’s feasibility study calculates the "Lifetime Value" of its student "customers"; uses "content" as a synonym for "education"; and promises to move away from "teacher-directed" lessons to computer-centered, "teacher-as-facilitator" activities. But the pitch doesn’t stop at the bottom line. In its request for proposals, the Board treats the laptop-ification of grade school as a matter of life or death. In the now standard rhetoric, the drive for computers is compared to "other great American opportunities or crises," like "bringing electricity to all corners of the nation" and "finding a cure for polio."

Despite these token nods to the past, the Board’s plan is almost willfully ahistorical. The same claims it makes for computers in the classroom were made for radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s, for television in the 1950s (which one broadcaster called a "21-inch classroom"), and even for now obscure devices like John B. Watson’s "teaching machine." Some of these technologies have no doubt added real value to learning, but not one has come anywhere near to being the cure-all, the surrogate teacher that techno-utopians promised. So how can anyone who purports to know something about education push computers as a panacea?

This question is the focus of this issue of Stay Free! How can history survive in a country ruled by commerce? Short answer: It can’t. If Martin Luther King Jr. selling internet gear hasn’t yet driven the point home, the repeated attempts of marketers to pass off advertising as education reveals the Man’s ingrained loathing of certain types of learning. History—a true, warts-and-all inquiry into the past—is a nuisance. So it should be no surprise that the "happily-ever-after" pablum that passes as history in schools is, in the end, a lot like advertising. There is, however, a notable difference: Advertising is focused on the future, targeting our ever-increasing quest for the new. So while advertising aims to increase desire, this history (or pseudo-history) hopes to kill it. By decontextualizing events, by erasing competing arguments, by boring students to death, pseudo-history inspires nothing but a distaste for history. Therein lies a great irony, which we discuss elsewhere (starting on p. 22): History has become the least imaginative and most hated subjects taught in school precisely because it is so important.

Stay Free! has long wrestled with the need for alternatives to the culture of advertising. Rather than simply attacking something like "advertising" or "corporatization"—rather than defining what you’re for by what you’re against—to create the culture we want to support. These are, after all, two ways of addressing the same problem. To push for historical understanding, to read and ask questions about the social and political world, this is to counter market ideology . . . which is why we chose to devote an issue to history, and why, in the future, I hope to provide historical context for everything we write about.

Carrie McLaren
May 1, 2001