How do we educate our children for a new world? becomes an important issue when people are aware the world is changing
True today and true also in the early 20th century.

• boys were encouraged to experiment with technology the way kids growing up in the 1970s were encouraged to learn computer programming
  
• it was seen as important for kids to become familiar with technology--from rockets to the easy bake oven
• doing things at home, like making a model airplane that flew, gave a sense of command over all the confusing new technology
• factory production had made lots of cheap identical items available, and there was a backlash in favor of the homemade
• risk taking was glorified (notice how our attitudes towards risk have changed)
  
• you could and needed to learn to fix your own automobile
• an earlier stage of promoting technological literacy --what skills did kids need to learn to live in a more technological age?
  
• For more on toys: Boys and their Toys : Masculinity, Class and Technology in America by Roger Horowitz
  

technology as a hobby in the modern era

• the world was changing rapidly, how could people feel a part and some control
• they worried about what they were losing--particularly that technology would make people soft, not good citizens
• one big question was how technology would change gender roles

Is that different more recently?

• the earliest users of home computers were electronics hobbyists who had started out in amateur radio, almost entirely white men
  
• the equivalent today might be hobbyists who use 3D printers

The modern age saw enthusiasm for technology combined with anxiety about how technology was changing people's lives

• enthusiasm for progress: technological progress was seen as always good
• anxiety: was technology making people soft or lazy
• were people losing the self-sufficiency and independence they had learned on the frontier?
  

today some people are interested in reviving old skills and making things themselves in both old and new ways

• making cheese at home
• sauerkraut, yogurt and beer
• items you can make with a 3D printer
• what do these interests say about our relationship with technology
• be more creative, not just passive consumers

we can live with technology and ask

• what are the new opportunities
  
• what experiences are we losing
• what are the dangers of being dependent on technology

A concern about education grew out of the new technological world and there was also a concern about citizenship from the impact on the United States of the closing of the frontier (Frederick Jackson Turner--The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893)

• Jefferson argued that democracy would work because voters were mostly yeoman farmers
  
• people believed that the frontier experience had resulted in American individualism and democracy
• the first transcontinental railroad opened in 1869 and by the 1890s the frontier was gone
• there was still uninhabited land but in chunks here and there--there was no longer a line where settlement reached this far and beyond that line was wilderness and the homes of indigenous people.
  
• people worried that the United States was going to lose those characteristics that had made it great, because some believed those came from the frontier
  
• industry had become more important than agriculture

Boy Scouting was one attempt at an answer.  The Boy Scouts included the experimenting with technology, but their strongest pitch was that technology is making us soft and a boy needs to experience wilderness and self-sufficiency in order to become a man

• originated in England in 1907, came to America in 1910 and took a distinctively American shape
• there were other similar youth groups before Boy Scouts became dominant, with names like Woodcraft Indians and Sons of Daniel Boone.
  
• the theory was that boys needed education that elementary schools (by this time taught almost entirely by women) couldn't provide
  
• Boy Scout Handbook taught how to live in the wilderness

Technology might make you soft but wilderness experience (and hunting) and risk-taking would turn you from a weakling into a man

• think of Tarzan
• quick history of gender roles:
  • colonial times--there was a division of labor but men and women's work were both needed and the husband and wife usually worked in same place (not only on the farm but also in artisan's shops).  Both men's work and women's work were essential economic contributions to the family.
    
  • before the civil war the idea grew that women's place is in the home (historians call this the cult of domesticity), as men's work became more technological and moved away from the home.  The new ideal was that men worked away from home, women stayed home
    
  • this begins to change as women take a larger public role around the turn of the century (women get the vote in the U.S. in 1920)
  • in the early 20th century women were very involved in reform movements such as cleaning up dirty cities
    
  • in the late 19th century more kinds of work outside the home open up for women
  • before the civil war secretaries were men
  • introduction of the typewriter makes being a secretary a woman's job
    
  • women move into the professions (including engineering) in a small way starting in the 1890s
• masculinity was associated at the time with characteristics such as: rational intelligence, angry, strong, independent, decision-making
  
• going out in the wilderness and also building things and playing with risky technologies were ways of making men more masculine

Modern era approach to technology and childhood?

• you should still learn to do things without technology, not be too dependent
  
• kids should also get to explore technology--it will appeal if it is open-ended and risky
• Modern era--encouraged kids to experiment with technology so they can grow up to be inventors
• John Dewey wrote in 1915: "Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing." (more)
• Was it enough to learn reading, writing, and numeracy?

Today, education is more concerned with preparing students to be citizens of a technological world.

• No Child Left Inside--is our world too technological?
  
• applying science to education: research based study habits
• Scientific Literacy--students need to know something of the sciences in order to live in an increasingly technological world
  
• Technological literacy--make sure you can use the tools of modern life
• computers and the internet
• GPS and telephone
• calculators--good example of the question of how much should we know how to do ourselves and how much is it ok to be reliant on technology?
  
• For example see these standards
• Science and Technology in Society focuses more on citizenship
• impact of technology on society
• how society shapes technology
  

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