Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education by Katie Day Good

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education by Katie Day Good Timothy Kelly Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education. By Katie Day Good. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. xii + 279 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and amplified the role that technology plays in today's K–12 education and opened widespread debate about its efficacy, equity, and appropriateness. Katie Day Good suggests that we might reasonably be concerned with other questions as well, such as toward what ideological purpose these technologies might be aimed. She does so by exploring another push for greater integration of technology in the classroom that occurred a century earlier. Good sees this early to mid-twentieth-century movement to expand the use of technology in schools as coming from two sources. The first was a pedagogical reform initiative that urged teachers to expand beyond rote and textbook-based learning in favor of a rich immersion in imagery and sound that would allow students to use more of their senses to learn. The second was a growing conviction that Americans should become citizens of the world rather than see themselves as set apart from it. Good suggests that these two movements [End Page 327] converged "amidst rising social concerns about intercultural contact, mass media, and global war" (3). Advocates for implementing these technologies stressed their abilities to open the world to students, to allow them to see the foreign and exotic from the safety of the classroom, and to generate support for efforts by the United States to reshape that world to be more hospitable to American values. Good argues that "these media were more than mere AV aids; they were powerful 'devices' for efficiently preparing children to understand and uphold the dominant social values of native-born European Americans within an increasingly diverse United States, and ensure a dominant role for the nation in a changing international order" (27). The new technologies encompassed a wide range of media and included such innovations in sensory stimulation as stereoscopes, lantern slides, movies, and radio. Each of these allowed teachers to bring the world to their classrooms, to provide rich information about other places, cultures, and societies for students who might never leave their home counties. Educators and the for-profit producers of most of these technologies promoted them as sensorily powerful and safe ways to expose students to knowledge that they would otherwise have to travel to learn. The technologies would make students more cosmopolitan in their outlooks at a time when the United States had begun to expand its role in shaping the world. This greater international responsibility required that Americans shed their parochial outlooks. It also depended on students maintaining a high degree of surety that the world ought to conform to American ideals and interests. It demanded a sophisticated world view and a deeply felt patriotism. Even as progressive educators championed new technologies for their abilities to offer students a wider sensory experience, teachers often saw the virtues of some less cutting-edge "technologies." They favored maps for instance, bulletin boards, and pageants that celebrated America's embrace of ethnic diversity. Teachers could master these readily and they stimulated student learning. Schools could afford them. Good offers rich evidence revealing the goals that technology developers and promoters advanced for their products, as well as of the discourse that took place in educators' professional associations. We learn much about what interested adults intended these technologies to accomplish—or worried that they might do. Less clear is how students actually experienced the technologies. The sources for this are far more elusive and so we do not get a clear sense of whether students imbibed the lessons as the curriculum designers intended. In the midst of this early twentieth-century technology push, the world suffered a pandemic that killed far more people worldwide than COVID-19 [End Page 328] will likely claim. Given the powerful role that we saw the COVID-19 pandemic play in shaping technology advancements in K–12 education in recent years, it might be useful to consider the impact that the 1918 influenza outbreak played in this...