Knocking at the Schoolhouse Door: The SHOT/AHA Booklet Series Historical Perspectives on Technology, Culture, and Society

A visitor to Washington, D.C., who happens upon the United States Department of Education is in for a surprise: in front of the massive building housing the federal government's education bureaucracy now stand four bright-red, one-room schoolhouses, each labeled "No Child Left Behind." The juxtaposition is symbolic of a troubled relationship. The structures call up a vision of school as a rural community institution, where classroom technology means chalk and a woodstove. The No Child Left Behind Act signed by President Bush in January 2002, however, puts forth a technocratic vision of schooling in which standardized testing, scientific analysis of data, and the restructuring of failing schools lie at the center of national policy.

More than any other development of the past thirty years (since the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education), standardized tests and the penalties imposed by state governments—and now the federal government—on schools and students that fail to score high enough on them have reshaped education and the role of educators in the United States. In Michigan, social studies tests are based on a curriculum developed in the 1990s that covers everything from world history to economics to global geography to problem solving and political argumentation. Schools scramble to avoid falling into the category of having failed to make "adequate yearly progress" in test-measured achievement, and look toward any solution that will drive scores a notch upward and keep them off the front page of the local newspaper.

This is an auspicious time in American education for interdisciplinary efforts, especially those aimed at integrating history and technology. At the K-12 and college levels, interdisciplinary curricula are touted as being more meaningful and maximizing the benefits of instructional time. Accrediting agencies on both sides of the two-cultures divide are asking where students learn to think interdisciplinarily: the National Council for the Social Studies wants students to be trained in the relations among science, technology, and society; the National Science Teachers Association looks for future science teachers to know about the social impact of the science they are teaching; and the International Technology Education Association standards for technological literacy include a historical/social component. And the Bush administration has been relentless in demanding that professional development for teachers focus on content, not just teaching strategies or pedagogical ideas.

But for each of these bright spots there is a dark side. While schools and universities are being asked to create interdisciplinary curricula, in most states funding to develop new classes and train teachers has been cut. While federal grant money is used to promote professional development for teachers in subjects such as history and science, the push for higher test scores, also mandated by federal policy, turns districts away from long-term issues and focuses attention on next year's standardized test. Finally, all of the pressure of educational reform has fallen on teachers, who do not like being asked to change their curricula one more time to incorporate science, technology, and society issues.

When the Society for the History of Technology and the American Historical Association launched their booklet series Historical Perspectives on Technology, Culture, and Society in 1998, they did not plan to enter such choppy educational waters. Nor can it make things any easier that so many practicing teachers were never even introduced as undergraduates or graduate students to the history of technology, as the field has really come into its own only in the past two decades.

The SHOT/AHA series (six volumes have been published to date, with more forthcoming; price six dollars each for members of either society) falls into an established genre in historical publishing: succinct works designed to get across a historiographic or historical point as a help to both the novice and those with some background in a subject who need to get back up to speed. The American Historical Association has published such pamphlets for decades, beginning in the 1950s as part of...