insisting that pencils are technology is not (necessarily) a wiseass move

Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument. In particular, I want to take issue with this part of Musgrave’s essay:

Now, there’s always some wiseass scholar in the audience who wants to say that “technology has always been in the classroom” and they want to talk about how pens or pencils or flint arrows are “technology”, but we all know that what we mean are computers—the most powerful general-purpose tool of the past one hundred years.

In this post, I am going to be that wiseass for a second, but as the title of this post suggests, while I’m sure there are people who invoke pencils as technology to be the wiseass who dismisses Musgrave’s concerns about educational technologies, I think there’s a productive way to understand pencils as technology, too. In fact, I think Musgrave’s skepticism about the purported revolutionary potential of Canvas and AI gets even stronger if we broaden “technology” beyond the general-purpose computer.

Musgrave begins his essay with some reflection on the “Oregon Trail generation” (born between 1977 and 1983) being the “first for which ’technology in the classroom’ was a guiding principle of our educators.” Consider, though, that in 1986, when even the oldest children of that generation were still in primary school, educational technology critic Larry Cuban was already writing in Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 about the failures of radio and television to deliver on their purported revolutionary potential and drawing lines between those technologies and the computer. Audrey Watters, in the much more recent Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, traced many of the modern problems with educational technologies back to B. F. Skinner’s work in the early 20th century. Hell, I enjoy showing students this blurb from Josiah F. Bumstead’s (couldn’t make up a better name for this example if I tried) 1841 book The black board in the primary school:

The inventor or introducer of the black-board system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind; and so he will be regarded by all who know its merits, and are familiar with school-room trials.

As Bumstead demonstrates, misplaced hype about educational technology is nothing new; as Cuban demonstrates, the problems with that misplaced hype are nothing new. In fact, let’s go to an even broader (but arguably even less wiseass) definition of what (educational) technology is to show how a broad definition of technology can actually give us the very conceptual tools we need to critique it. Over the course of 2025, I’ve been reading a lot of Jacques Ellul, and I think that he provides a helpful definition of technique that we can use (in a scholarly rather than wiseass fashion) to make sense of both pencils and generative AI as belonging to the same category and yet qualitatively different. In his The Technological Society, Ellul defines technique as follows:

“The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.

Ellul’s definition of technique (which we’re going to consider here as equivalent to technology, even though he would hate that) is so broad as to almost be useless. Yet, his marrying of technique to efficiency is helpful here. The push for Canvas and generative AI in the college classroom comes from the same fetishization of efficiency that Ellul was concerned about in the 1950s. And yet, to quote Musgrave:

That digitalization looks modern and efficient but it often is anything but. It takes me hours longer to create a course shell than it used to and the results are not appreciably better; indeed, because of shortcomings in the tools, I find myself frequently battling between adapting my course to the machine or bashing the machine into doing what I want.

Ellul’s loose definition of technique as that which is adopted or imposed in the name of efficiency (and efficacy) fits nicely with Musgrave’s (and countless others’) observation that that which is adopted or imposed in the name of efficiency creates new problems that we haven’t fully thought through. Let’s even take this a step further: Ellul’s emphasis on efficacy and efficiency may draw our attention to other roots of the problem that go beyond “computers” or “software.” Here’s the French sociologist’s skepticism of government funding of research, in a way that feels painfully familiar in 2025:

The state claims to represent the public interest and hence to have the duty of being a “good manager,” dispensing the public revenues only on condition that they mean something, that they pay off.

There’s no denying that the Trump Administration is acting in bad faith in cutting research funding “in the public interest,” and yet Ellul’s broad definition of technology helps us understand it in the same vein that we understand its relentless cheerleading of generative AI in schools, and countless other appeals to efficiency that are societally detrimental.

I’ve spent longer on this post than Musgrave’s self-imposed 20 minutes, and it’s time for me to go back to my own wrestling with Canvas to get it to do what I want it to do. I appreciate the original argument of the post, and I’ll be thinking about it in the months to come—but I hope I’ve demonstrated how that argument can get richer when we accept the pencil as another educational technology.

• edtech
• Jacques Ellul
• Bluesky
• Donald Trump