Welcome in, everyone. I am just thrilled to have
you joining us today. Yeah, it's great to be
here. If you're the kind of person who constantly
asks why things are the way they are, well, you've
landed in the exact right place. Today, our mission
on this deep dive is to explore a truly fascinating,
um... a really unexpected slice of technology
history. Absolutely. We're going to figure out
exactly how, when, and I think most importantly,
why computers first entered the classroom. It's
a phenomenal topic, and it's one of the subjects
where the actual history completely defies our
modern assumptions. The source material we're
using today is a really thought -provoking 2019
article by Gary Ackerman. It's titled When Computers
Started School, and it was published over on
the blog hackscience .education. And I want to
challenge your assumptions right out of the gate
here. Because when I say early educational technology,
what pops into your head? You probably picture
a clunky desktop sitting in the school library
somewhere. Yeah, totally. Maybe it has a glowing
green screen, a really heavy mechanical keyboard,
and it's running some rudimentary organ trail
style game. Right, that classic 1980s or 90s
visual. That is the era when computing became
a hands -on, highly visible part of the student
experience. But according to Ackerman's research,
that image completely misses the true beginning
of the story. The actual origins of school computing
don't start with friendly desktop machines designed
for kids. The story starts much earlier, and
honestly much darker. It starts with World War
II, the Manhattan Project, and machines the size
of entire rooms. Okay, let's unpack this. To
understand how computers got into schools, we
really have to look at where they came from in
the first place. Historians often trace the earliest
conceptual beginnings back to the 19th century
with Charles Babbage and his analytic machine.
Right, the mechanical era. Exactly, but the history
of electronic digital computing, the direct lineage
to the devices you and I use today, that is usually
measured from the creation of the ENIC. And this
is where the context gets heavy, because the
ENIC wasn't built for learning. It wasn't built
to store library catalogs. It was built for massive
military computations during World War II. We're
talking about the kind of complex, massive -scale
mathematics required for global warfare. The
text points out that this specifically included
calculations for the Manhattan Project. Wow.
It's truly staggering to think about. The very
technology that now sits in the backpacks of
millions of schoolchildren around the world has
its roots in the creation of weapons of mass
destruction. Yeah, it's a stark contrast. You
contrast that reality of 1940s computing with
the idea of a kindergarten classroom. You have
a technology built to calculate blast radiuses
and artillery trajectories, and we somehow bridge
the gap from that to teaching fractions. It sets
up a major logistical hurdle for the post -war
era. Because when World War II ends, you have
this incredibly powerful, staggeringly expensive
new technology. But the immediate existential
demand of a global war effort is suddenly gone.
Right. The war is over. So the question becomes,
what happens to these machines now? Well, they
certainly didn't roll them into the local elementary
school. No, not at all. After the war, computers
were introduced very slowly into what the source
material calls information -rich industries.
information -rich industries. All right. Think
about the sectors of the economy that are just
drowning in data. We're looking at military production,
which obviously continued post -war, but also
insurance companies and airlines. That makes
perfect sense. These were massive operations.
I mean, insurance actuaries and airline logistics
departments had the sheer volume of raw data
to justify the machine. And more importantly,
they had the massive budgets required to actually
afford one. Because at this point in history,
these mainframes were wildly expensive to build,
buy, and maintain. Which brings us to a detail
from the text that completely reframes the scale
of this early industry. According to the article,
in the years immediately following World War
II, the annual sales of computers could be counted
with single digits. Wait, single digits? Yeah.
Are we talking literally under 10 computers sold
globally in a whole year? Yes, between four and
nine units sold an entire year across the entire
industry. I want you, the listener, to let that
sink in for a second. We live in a world where
tech companies move millions of devices in a
single holiday weekend. And here we have an entire
global industry in the years after the war, surviving
on half a dozen sales. It's hard to imagine how
an industry selling that few units survives,
let alone grows enough to eventually target public
school districts. What's fascinating here is
the economic engine that those single -digit
sales slowly started to build. Ackerman describes
a cycle of industry push and market pull that
began to drive sales and expand capacity. So
even with those tiny sales numbers, the amount
of money changing hands was massive because the
machines were so prohibitively expensive. Exactly.
As the early market slowly expanded, you know,
as a few more insurance companies and airlines
bought in, more capital became available to the
computer manufacturers to fund their R &D departments.
They're reinvesting it. Right. They poured that
revenue back into making the machines faster,
more reliable and crucially cheaper to produce.
That R &D leads to technological advances, which
expands computing capacity while simultaneously
driving down the cost of production. If they're
pouring all that airline and insurance money
back into R &D for 15 straight years, the tech
is bound to get cheaper. And that puts us right
in the early 1960s. By the early 1960s, the price
of mainframe computers had finally decreased
to a tipping point. They were still massive and
still incredibly expensive by our modern standards,
but the cost had dropped just enough that a brand
new market opened up. Schools. Yes. Selling to
the educational market became a real mathematical
possibility for these tech companies. And the
source text points out that this convergence
has led to a very cynical perspective among some
historical observers. Oh, definitely. There are
cynics out there who suggest that the so - educational
applications of computing were entirely invented
out of thin air for one specific reason. To sell
more machines. Exactly. So that tech companies
could secure sales in this massive untapped school
market to keep their R &D cycle churning. It's
a compelling argument. I mean, were early computer
advocates genuinely trying to revolutionize human
learning or were they just trying to open up
a new revenue stream? We aren't here to take
sides on that debate, of course. We're simply
reporting on the perspectives outlined in the
source material. But it is a vital piece of context
to understand the motivation behind the push.
Absolutely. Regardless of whether you view it
as a corporate cash grab or a genuine pedagogical
movement, the historical fact remains the same.
The result was incredibly swift. Yeah, we went
from calculating nuclear explosions in the 1940s
to pitching educational systems to schools by
the 1960s. It's a whiplash inducing pivot. Here's
where it gets really interesting. We need to
talk about Don Bushnell. Yes. Don Bushnell is
a central figure in this narrative. In 1963,
he wrote a monograph for the Department of Audiovisual
Instruction, which was part of the National Education
Association. In this document, he lays out a
very bold, very specific blueprint for the future
of computers in schools. Bushnell predicted,
and I'll quote from the text here, that the digital
computer and its peripheral equipment will support
most of the subsystems in the total school complex.
That phrasing alone is so revealing, subsystems
in the total school complex. Yeah. It sounds
like he's describing a nuclear submarine or a
Boeing assembly plant, not a place where children
go to learn. It strips a lot of the humanity
out of the environment, doesn't it? Bushnell
envisioned a highly standardized educational
environment. In his mind, a computer rich classroom
was a place where a uniform curriculum would
be delivered to all students via computer terminals.
And how was learning actually measured in this
system? I mean, it wasn't through essays or a
creative project. No, not at all. It was entirely
binary. Students learning would be measured solely
based on their ability to provide correct answers
to questions posed by the computer. And the correctness
of those answers would be judged strictly according
to the answers already stored inside the computer's
memory. It's a completely closed loop. The computer
holds the ultimate truth. It asks the student
for the truth. And if the student matches the
computer's stored data, learning has supposedly
occurred. Wow. It's rote memorization and recall
mediated entirely by a machine. It feels incredibly
rigid. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
you can really see the philosophical underpinnings
of the era bleeding into education. This picture
of a highly standardized computer -mediated curriculum
was heavily promoted as a very efficient method
of teaching. Efficiency. That is the magic word
of the industrial age. Exactly. The promises
being made about computers in education that
they would improve efficiency, standardize output,
and maximize productivity were the exact same
promises being made to businesses and factories
adopting mainframes at the time. So the school
was essentially being conceptualized as an information
factory. Yes. The curriculum is the raw material,
the student is the product being assembled, and
the computer is the ultimate efficient manager
of the assembly line, ensuring every product
meets the exact same standardized specifications.
That is a striking vision, especially when you
contrast it with modern educational philosophies
that emphasize creativity, critical thinking,
and personalized learning. But to me, the most
mind -blowing part of Bushnell's vision isn't
just the factory model philosophy. What is it?
It's the technological reality of what he was
actually proposing. We're talking about the physical
hardware itself. Yes. Think about the timeline.
Bushnell is proposing this grand automated computer
mediated learning environment in 1963. The author
points out that this was decades before the development
of the general purpose desktop computer. This
was long before the GUI. It's so easy to take
for granted today that computing is accessible
to almost anyone to perform almost any desired
function. But in the early 1960s, computers were
massive, intimidating machines. They were largely
operated by specialized technicians. And the
programming. Ackerman notes that these computers
were programmed by physically reconfiguring the
circuits. Yeah, that's wild. We aren't talking
about typing code on a keyboard to change a variable.
We're talking about technicians physically moving
cables and plugging them into different sockets
on massive plug boards to change the electrical
pathways. The physical architecture was the program.
If you wanted to change the math lesson, you
had to literally re - wire or the machine, which
creates a fascinating paradox for Bushnell's
vision of education. Because the technology required
dedicated technicians to operate and physical
reconfiguration to program, the actual computers
themselves could not be in the classroom with
the students. Exactly. The text states that in
the education envisioned by Bushnell, students
and teachers would interact with the information,
presumably through some kind of rudimentary terminal
or punch card system, but the devices themselves,
the actual mainframes doing the processing, would
remain completely unseen and untouched by the
students and teachers. They would be hidden away
in some climate -controlled back room or basement,
humming away, processing the data, and feeding
the standardized curriculum to the terminals.
the ultimate invisible authority in the school
building. It's a powerful image. The invisible
teacher made of wires and vacuum tubes hidden
behind a wall, measuring your worth based on
how well your answers match its stored data.
It feels a bit like dystopian science fiction,
but this was the genuine documented blueprint
for the future of education being promoted by
serious advocates in the 1960s. It highlights
a massive disconnect between the theoretical
desire to use computers for teaching and the
physical reality of what computers actually were
at that point in history. Right. The advocates
wanted a revolution in learning, but the tools
they had available were basically gigantic and
flexible calculators built for war and corporate
logistics. And you can't help but wonder how
that physical separation impacted the psychology
of the students. I mean, you're being judged
and evaluated by a machine you're not allowed
to see, let alone touch or understand. It reinforces
that factory model where the student is merely
a passive recipient of standardization. So what
does this all mean? If we trace the journey we've
been on today, it's quite right. It really is.
We started with a machine built to calculate
the physics of the atomic bomb. We watched that
technology transition into a post -war economy,
where annual sales were literally in the single
digits, adopted only by the most data -heavy,
cash -rich industries. We saw how the relentless
cycle of industry push and market pull eventually
drove costs down enough by the 1960s to make
the educational market a target. We explored
the cynics view that perhaps this push into schools
was more about opening new revenue streams than
genuine pedagogy. Right. And we unpacked the
incredibly standardized factory model vision
of education that those early computers inspired,
where learning was reduced to matching stored
data on an unseen machine hidden away from the
students and teachers. I want to bring this right
back to you, the listener. The next time you
open up your lightweight laptop or you tap on
an educational app on your phone or you watch
a kid interacting with a colorful touch screen
to learn math or language, take a moment to think
about this history. Yeah. Think about how completely
different your tactile, personalized, highly
visible experiences compared to the rigid, unseen
mainframes that the visionaries of the 1960s
were imagining. We've come incredibly far from
the days of technicians rewiring circuits in
a hidden basement just to deliver a multiple
choice question. This raises an important question,
one that I think is worth keeping in the back
of your mind long after this deep dive is over.
Okay, let's hear it. If the original 1960s push
for computers in schools was so deeply rooted
in industrial -era efficiency, this idea of treating
the student's mind like a standardized factory
product to be measured against stored data, how
much of today's modern educational technology
is still secretly carrying that exact same philosophy,
just hidden behind a much prettier, touchable
screen? Oh, wow. That is a brilliant question
to end on. Are we really experiencing a different
philosophy of learning? Or just a more beautiful,
user -friendly interface for the same old standardization?
That's something for all of us to chew on. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the source material. It's always a privilege
to explore these complex histories when you'll.
Until next time, speak curious, keep questioning
the world around you, and most importantly, keep
learning.