Technology

Plato generally uses epistêmê (knowledge) and technê (art or craft) interchangeably, but in Philebus, he divides knowledge into two types: the first addressing education and philosophy and the second addressing production. The fact that technê is teachable is what makes it an epistêmê. From antiquity, the two types of knowledge are inseparable; education and technology will always require each other. Hence, Archimedes's planetarium, a device that communicated knowledge of heavenly bodies and the gods, was never fully didaskê (instruction), epistêmê, mechanê (mechanics), or technê. Etymologically, curriculum, a Latin term for race ground or race course, will always have a technological dimension, even as the infinitive cur-rere (to run, traverse) and the related cursu reference an experiential dimension. Both terms are first used in their modern sense in the late 16th century: curriculum is introduced in 1576 and technologia in 1563 in Latin texts of Petrus Ramus, a noted rhetorician at the University of Paris. Curriculum referred to the complete course of the seven liberal arts, and technologia to the arts of properly arranging, delineating, or systematizing their contents. Indeed, curriculum and technology co-emerge within a specific post-Reformation system of education. Technology is first defined in The New World of English Words in 1706 (“a Description of Arts, especially the Mechanical”). Although curriculum is used through the 17th and 18th centuries in universities such as Glasgow and Leiden, it first appears in English with its Ramist denotation in A Technological Dictionary, published in 1846 (“the complete course of studies of a university, school, &c.”). Foucauldian scholars found that bureaucracy is part and parcel of modern schooling, thus technology and curriculum are mutually inherent.

This raises two questions: To what extent is curriculum a technology? And to what extent is technology a curriculum? The first question resolved [Page 877]over the 18th and 19th centuries through German didactics and object teaching, or what was called general method in the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this is coincident with the question of whether education (e.g., didactics, pedagogics) is a science. Franklin Bobbitt's technique of curriculum making, delineated in 1918 in The Curriculum, along with standardized testing and the school executive's scientific management systems, epitomized what historian Raymond Callahan described as the “cult of efficiency” in U.S. schooling. The second question, the extent to which technology is a curriculum, is found in Francis Bacon's case for useful knowledge articulated in The Advancement of Learning in the early 17th century. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) reiterated the dangers of unchecked optimism in a curriculum of mechanical arts and natural philosophy. Ironically, there was also risk in contempt for the technology curriculum and its creations. This question resolved over the 18th and 19th centuries through the establishment of engineering institutions, the École Polytechnique (1794), Franklin Institute (1824), and Rensselaer School (1824) or lyceum schools in general. Similarly, historically Black colleges, such as Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (1881), schools of industry, manual training centers, home economics, and technical education, offered a technology curriculum for oppressed and working classes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Historians acknowledge that technological literacies linked to the grammar of the machine were indispensable to ingenuity while germane to forms of alienation documented Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In the name of mass, progressive education in schools, the technology curriculum competed for status and won legitimacy even as labeling, sorting, and tracking reinforced a differentiation of knowledge and skill maintaining conditions for cultural reproduction and preservation of social order. Audiovisual communications faced similar contradictions once specialists shifted from correlating and integrating to developing a media curriculum in the 1960s. Thus, media and technology curriculum formed under suspicion of indoctrination and vocationalism.

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