Peter Lyman

What is "computer literacy," and what is its place in liberal
education?

Liberal education is incomplete if it does not prepare educated
people to address the presence of technology and, more important,
the presence of technology's information products, in an informed
and critical way. There are four reasons I say this.

First, the traditional liberal arts understanding of technology
as machine, merely an "object" in relation to human "subjectivity,"
is an essentially aristocratic attitude that fails to acknowledge the
way technology and information saturate the modern world in
which educated people live and work.

Second, defining the computer as a mere machine is an un-
critical ideology that enhances the technological mythology that
computers are more objective than humans, thereby masking and
legitimating the social power of technicians.

But, third, there is a deeper reason as well: technical objects are
created within a technical culture that contains a powerful (if
tacit) critique of liberal education, one that has the potential to
replace liberal education in the modern world.

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