Computer Literacy as Ideology

Noble offers powerful arguments that the introduction of computer literacy as an agenda for our schools is motivated more by the needs of business and the military than by its inherent educational worth. Indeed, he traces the very introduction of computers themselves back to the specific demands of the military-industrial complex. It was in this specific milieu that computer development generally, and computerized education especially, began - hardly an ideology-free birthplace (see Noble, 1991).

Noble is not alone in his suspicions. Prominent Canadians such as Stephen Lewis, the former Ambassador to the United Nations, have expressed fears that a preoccupation with computers is forcing more traditional, and more enriching, forms of literacy off the agenda of the public schools (Lewis, 1990). David Suzuki, the popular Canadian science writer, has said that the "cry for computer literacy has been, in my view, one of the biggest cons ever foisted on the school system" (Suzuki, 1989, p. 195).

In spite of these criticisms and cautions, however, the ideology of computer literacy as an educational necessity persists, and is constantly reinforced by educational bureaucrats and specialist teachers.

For this study, we will rely on the qualitative data gleaned from extensive classroom observations, repeated interviews with particpating teachers, and over 200 interviews with high-school students conducted during a three-year study into classroom computer use in London, Ontario, Canada (see Goodson, Mangan, & Rhea, 1991). By presenting both a review of the critical literature on classroom computing, and extensive quotations from the actual words of the teachers and students involved in our study, we hope to be able to accomplish an anlysis that will proceed on several levels. It will probe the ideology of computer literacy through a deconstruction of its rhetoric and its assumpions; it will search for the ways in which that rhetoric is received, and those assumptions encountered, by school actors; and will it strive to reproduce a sense of the often contradictory and conflicting reactions of students and teachers who engage the realities of educational computing within their ideological context. Finally, we will suggest some of the practical implications of an ideological analysis of computer literacy, and what it can do for educators who are situated within the present debates over computer use in schools.