Are Educational Technology and School Restructuring Appropriate Partners

Introduction Through my years of involvement with education, both as a public school teacher and now as a teacher educator, school restructuring seems to be the reform movement which holds the most promise for significant and fundamental educational change.1 Its strength is not in the originality of the ideas, but rather in the particular constellation of ideas that characterize it and, most importantly, the educational questions and critiques restructuring is forcing. There have been no more thoughtful critics of the “industrial school” than John Dewey, Paul Goodman, John Holt, Charles Silberman, Jonathan Kozol, Ted Sizer, Maxine Greene, and most recently, John Gatto (1992), whose insightful little text Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling has renewed this line of critique. However, these critiques have never seemed to penetrate what Harry Broudy called the “real world of the public schools.” Now many of these trenchant critiques—once considered the province of only the most radical educational critics of a rigid, mechanistic, and rationalistic public education system—have found their way into the current debate. “Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 1995