Computer Literacy as Ideology

These are precisely the questions we wish to raise in connection with the taken-for-granted uses of computer literacy as a justificatory discourse. Apple himself has recognized the importance of the technologizing of classrooms as an ideologically freighted innovation:

The debate about the role of the new technology in society and in schools is not and must not be just about the technical coreectness of what computers can and cannot do. These may be the least important kinds of questions, in fact. Instead, at the very core of the debate are the ideological and ethical issues concerning what schools should be about and whose interests they should serve (Apple, 1988, p. 153).

Similar themes are taken up by other critical analysts of education such as Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz (see, e.g., Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Giroux, 1988). They see the concept of computer literacy as a corruption of the kind of genuinely critical literacy they feel is essential to producing an atmosphere of hope and possibility for succeeding generations.

At the moment, the neoconservatives have appropriated the concept of excellence and defined it as basic skills, technical training and classroom discipline. Schools are cuddling up to business and replacing any sensible notion of literacy with something called `computer literacy’. (Aronowitz quoted in Giroux, 1988, p.150).

Critiques of dominant ideologies such as these present special problems for research which seeks to ground itself solidly in the everyday lives of schools. It is precisely because the kinds of discourse which Apple and others have called “hegemonic” are pervasive, widely accepted, and backed by official authority, that it becomes a difficult empirical task to detect their operation, and the forms of resistance which they incur. Nevertheless, Giroux has suggested ways in which both research and pedagogy can be guided by a concern for listening carefully and criticially to the voices of those embedded within the day-to-day life of the institutions we are concerned with:

The importance of the relationship between power and discourse for a critical pedagogy is that it provides a theoretical grounding for interrogating the issue of how ideology is inscribed in those forms of educational discourse through which school experiences and practices are ordered and constituted. Moreover, it points to the necessity for accounting theoretically for the ways in which language, ideology, history, and experience come together to produce, define, and constrain particular forms of teacher-student practice... That is, power and discourse are now investigated... as a polyphony of voices mediated within different layers of reality shaped through an interaction of dominant and subordinate forms of power. (Giroux, 1988, pp. 116-117).

In Canada, as elsewhere, the need for computer literacy has become widely accepted as a kind of value-neutral, technological necessity of modern life. Since 1980, despite a succession of Governments representing all three major political parties in Ontario, it has remained an important priority of the educational system. Computer literacy may not be as neutral as some of its proponents assert, however. In fact, some critics have attacked the claim of value neutrality as itself ideological. Bowers (1990) has maintained that the concept of computer-mediated language as a neutral conduit of meaning is deceptive, and ignores the importance of discursive context to for all human interaction. Roszak (1986) has pointed to some of the potentially dangerous political consequences of "the cult of information." Noble (1984) has been unstinting in his criticism:

When one considers how education for computer literacy enfeebles in the name of empowerment, mystifies in the name of demythology, and disenfranchises in the name of participation, the question must be asked: Is it even possible in the current ideological climate to provide a potent pedagogy about computers? (p. 613).