by entaloneralie | 2025-07-25 19:42:47+00:00
I feel like John Holt, author of Unschooling, who is quoted numerous times in the article, would not be too keen on seeing his name in a post legitimizes a technology that uses inevitabilism to insert itself in all domains of life.

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"Technology Review," the magazine of MIT, ran a short article in January called "Housebreaking the Software" by Robert Cowen, science editor of the "Christian Science Monitor," in which he very sensibly said: "The general-purpose home computer for the average user has not yet arrived.

Neither the software nor the information services accessible via telephone are yet good enough to justify such a purchase unless there is a specialized need. Thus, if you have the cash for a home computer but no clear need for one yet, you would be better advised to put it in liquid investment for two or three more years." But in the next paragraph he says "Those who would stand aside from this revolution will, by this decade's end, find themselves as much of an anachronism as those who yearn for the good old one-horse shay." This is mostly just hot air.

What does it mean to be an anachronism? Am I one because I don't own a car or a TV? Is something bad supposed to happen to me because of that? What about the horse and buggy Amish? They are, as a group, the most successful farmers in the country, everywhere buying up farms that up-to-date high-tech farmers have had to sell because they couldn't pay the interest on the money they had to borrow to buy the fancy equipment.

Perhaps what Mr. Cowen is trying to say is that if I don't learn how to run the computers of 1982, I won't be able later, even if I want to, to learn to run the computers of 1990. Nonsense! Knowing how to run a 1982 computer will have little or nothing to do with knowing how to run a 1990 computer. And what about the children now being born and yet to be born? When they get old enough, they will, if they feel like it, learn to run the computers of the 1990s.

Well, if they can, then if I want to, I can. From being mostly meaningless, or, where meaningful, mostly wrong, these very typical words by Mr. Cowen are in method and intent exactly like all those ads that tell us that if we don't buy this deodorant or detergent or gadget or whatever, everyone else, even our friends, will despise, mock, and shun us the advertising industry's attack on the fragile self-esteem of millions of people. This using of people's fear to sell them things is destructive and morally disgusting.

The fact that the computer industry and its salesmen and prophets have taken this approach is the best reason in the world for being very skeptical of anything they say. Clever they may be, but they are mostly not to be trusted. What they want above all is not to make a better world, but to join the big list of computer millionaires.

A computer is, after all, not a revolution or a way of life but a tool, like a pen or wrench or typewriter or car. A good reason for buying and using a tool is that with it we can do something that we want or need to do better than we used to do it. A bad reason for buying a tool is just to have it, in which case it becomes, not a tool, but a toy.

On Computers Growing Without Schooling #29 September 1982

by John Holt.