Few fields have as an exciting a curricular challenge as the one we face in trying to claim space and legitimacy in the curriculum. But that is an aside. Part of the problem of our foundations is the decision whether to employ the same ones that supported industrial arts, or whether, now that we have changed the orientation of the field to technology, there is need anew for scholastic excavation. The challenge here lies in how we view technology. If we make no distinction between school technology and societal technology, then there is a real burden of unearthing foundations, an onerous burden.
Science educators make a distinction between science and school science.
They know they can't have particle accelerators in school labs, so their ambitions are thereby made modest. Technology is a way in which we can chronicle nothing less than the march of human existence. That is a scale that substantially dwarfs the subject whose origin in the United States we mark with the Philadelphia Exposition and with examples of dovetail joints. If we disentangle the school subject technology from the phenomenon of technology, then that is a different, more modest undertaking, and we can show the subject as something that has metamorphosed, meaning that old foundations do not disappear, but that we have to deal with new contexts and new impetuses. For example, clearly the new information age provides a dimension that was not present in the era of the manual training school.