Abstract
‘War as education’. ‘Education as war’. One might think that propaganda is surely the first point of application for these McLuhanisms. But McLuhan (see McLuhan and Fiore, 1968) directed us elsewhere, to the inevitable deployment of technological advancements for military purposes, to the certainty that military purposes drive technological advancement, and to the assaultive reorientation demanded by technological innovation. The unsettling implications of this circuitry appear to open up a critical assessment of the technological pursuits of both the military and educational institutions. In actuality, McLuhan’s impact upon education largely involved smoothing the way for an intensification of technologized instruction.
Peeking through so much of McLuhan’s writings is a deep concern about the role of education in light of the new media world he documented. For him, efforts to reorient human society to the conditions of the electronic age prompted engagement with, and radical reconceptualization of, the methods and priorities of schools and teachers. Understanding Media (1964) is a splendid illustration of this feature of his writings. Before the book begins, right on the copyright page, McLuhan acknowledges the ‘liberal aid’ provided by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) and the US Office of Education. This notice is a reference to the funding he secured under Title VII of the Sputnik-catalyzed 1958 National Defense Act to write Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960), effectively for the NAEB. And the final chapter of Understanding Media, ‘Automation’, opens with anecdotal evidence that modernization effectively ‘dissolves’ one-room schoolhouses (McLuhan, 1964: 346), and ends with an incautious celebratory declaration that ‘the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy’ (p. 359). He closes the book with what is effectively an accusation that believing automation portends uniformity is in fact an archaic product of a fading era of ‘mechanical standardization and specialism’ (p. 359).
As McLuhan learned from Harold Innis, changes in media produced spatial and temporal upheaval, meaning that previously bounded and delineated institutional spheres begin to crumble. Expanding André Maleux’s concept of ‘museums without walls’, McLuhan (1964: 283) proclaimed: The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls. The movies, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.
McLuhan drew the final line from the 1957 essay–poem Classroom without walls, which proposed that the overwhelming quotidian presence of media busted any final monopoly claimed by schools upon education. In that essay, he wrote: Today in our cities, most learning occurs outside the classroom. The sheer quantity of information conveyed by press-mags-film-TV-radio far exceeds the quantity of information conveyed by school instruction and texts. This challenge has destroyed the monopoly of the book as a teaching aid and cracked the very walls of the classroom, so suddenly, we’re confused, baffled. (McLuhan, 1960[1957]).
A late addition to his educational commitments was The City as Classroom (McLuhan, 1977), in which the city is effectively a teaching machine. This line of argument had been pursued by McLuhan for the two decades prior to this book’s appearance, and he used the ‘teaching machine’ analogy frequently, for instance, describing television as a teaching machine in Understanding Media (McLuhan, 1964: 292). ‘Teaching machine’, of course, had a specific resonance in the 1960s. It referred to a then popular set of individualized devices that had swept into audio-visual instruction, most of which found their way to obsolescence in dusty closets by the end of the decade. While the point of McLuhan’s reference may be lost on many readers today, it should inspire our scepticism toward the longevity of technological ‘sure things’ and toward the staying power of pedagogical fads.
In our record of McLuhan’s influence, we have tended to underappreciate how quickly he was taken up by pedagogical theorists and activists. American educationalists were especially early adopters of McLuhan and his ideas about the new literacies supposedly needed for the contemporary media environment. The NAEB invited him to deliver a keynote at their 1958 convention in Omaha (McLuhan, 1987: 288). In 1957, McLuhan offered a course to 30 high-school teachers on the grammar of the media (p. 251). He addressed the National Education Association’s Division of Audio-Visual Instruction in 1960 (p. 265). And John Culkin’s ‘A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan’ was said to be the Saturday Review’s most republished essay (Culkin, 1967; McLuhan, 1987: 300).
One choice document of McLuhan’s integration with the currents of educational exploration is the film The Communication Revolution, recorded during the Conference on Humanities, October 1960, at one of the most influential sites for audio-visual educational experiments, Ohio State University. 1 The film is a 22-minute conversation with McLuhan, leading educational theorist Edgar Dale, prominent radio educationalist Keith Tyler, and celebrated cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, who was easily the most famous man on stage at that particular moment. It is clear that the charismatic McLuhan and his claims command the agenda. The conversation is polite, but the participants express challenges, especially in response to McLuhan’s reluctance to speculate about what might be lost in a shift to a post-literate society. Yet, the discussion, and the fact of it having been recorded, demonstrates the intense curiosity and concern held by educationalists about the implications of the changing media environment. And indeed, while McLuhan’s wilder generalities about media effects may have baffled his esteemed discussants, the underlying premise about the expansion of the school grounds to the entire contemporary world, and about the necessity of designing new media for classroom contexts, had already been a priority item among educationalists for over a decade and was taken for granted by all on that stage in Columbus, Ohio.
McLuhan’s celebrity status is still a wonder today, especially for humanities scholars for whom anxiety of relevance is a morning stretching ritual. Among educationalists, though, McLuhan’s celebrity made complete sense. His work confirmed, and did not unsettle, the massive wave of audio-visual instruction programmes, and his writings helped smooth the way for the full acceptance of technologized pedagogy, ‘informal learning’, and open-concept classrooms in the 1960s. As early as 1946, with the publication of Edgar Dale’s important Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, a new generation of audio-visual educational theorists vigorously advocated for the modernization of the classroom, and the obsolescence of ‘the little red schoolhouse’, via a broad acceptance of new media literacy and of the educational prospects beyond the school yard. And by the mid-1960s, educational theorists and activists frequently and casually referenced McLuhan to give authority to these ideas. He fit with, and ultimately served to articulate in a credible and flashy, if bewildering, manner, approaches to instructional technology that were already well accepted by a major faction of techno-educationalists. He did not initiate these concepts, but his work and celebrity contributed to the legitimation of the audio-visual future for education at all levels. Essential media attributes did not produce this legitimation; dominant understanding about those features, the modern world, and educational policy did. The result was that classrooms became, and still are – as was so perfectly observed in Claude Jutra’s documentary on educational technology Comment savoir (1966) – automobile showrooms for new technology.