Fostering the Dream of Infallible and Efficient Instruction: Programmed Instruction and Teaching Machines in Cold War

• In Event: The Idea(l) of Deschooling: International and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Continuing Debate

Abstract

The paper investigates the development new teaching ideologies in the context of the overall technocratic ideology of the Cold War, assuming that these ideologies have not vanished after 1989. The catchwords of this educational ideology in the 1950’s were “programmed instruction” and “teaching machines,” promising improved and efficient learning progresses for all the students. Initially, this teaching ideology and technology had been developed in the early 1950s to train pilots of the US Air Force and gained educational momentum in the context of the educationalization of the Cold War in the wake of Sputnik (1957), profiting from massive financial support provided by the measures of the National Defense Education Act NDEA (1958). It was seen as a much better alternative to the then dominating educational ideology of “life adjustment” that was accused of not preparing young Americans to the exigencies of a competitive life in the Cold War. Ironically or not, in the wake of Khrushchev’s 1958 educational reform, “programmed instruction” and “teaching machines” became popular in the midst of the Soviet stakeholders and eventually translated and implemented into the Soviet education system. The paper examines the mental-cultural horizon(s) which made the trust in educational technology possible on both sides of the Iron Curtain and asks at the end if “the same” was in fact really “the same.”

Author

• Daniel Troehler, University of Vienna