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In this chapter I explain the relationship between globalization and technological literacy. After accounting for the notion of technological literacy that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the developed nations, I argue that this notion must be reshaped to fit the needs of the emerging global network society. That is, a renewed conception of technological literacy education must be developed to take account of changes in the global economy, including the widespread use of networked computer technologies.

The problem of technology has, since 1970, been radically altered by the global spread of market economies and networked computers. As a result, the notion of technological literacy education that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s must be re-constructed. After reviewing the impact of globalization and the spread of communications networks on the world occupational structure, and the consequent new risks borne by low-tier routine and informal workers, I offer a revision of the concept of technological literacy education that assigns important new roles to non-governmental organizations serving low-tier workers, and that places the hands-on use of networked computers at its core.

Ivan Mich — philosopher, historian, educator, and social critic — was born in Vienna, Austria, on September 4, 1926. In the Fall term of 1990, the Penn State Science, Technology, and Society Program organized a symposium on Illich’s thought to celebrate his fifth year as our colleague and in anticipation of his sixty-fifth birthday in 1991. Rustum Roy put the idea in motion by urging several members of the STS faculty and invited guests to prepare informal talks on the key books in the Mich corpus and the major themes explored in them.

It is difficult for readers new to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Societyto grasp its message unless they place it in the ideological context of the late 1960s. Painting with a broad brush, we may say that focal concerns of this time included inequality, psychological impotence, and environmental crisis

Citizens in our technological society are increasingly confronted with lifestyle choices and public policy issues which are beyond the scope of widely distributed analytical, interpretive, and practical skills. Examples of these issues include life-extension, genetic screening, solid waste disposal, strategic defense in space, release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment, and funding the super-collider and human genome projects. Because an intelligence sufficient to confront such matters is not possessed by masses of people from all social groups, the quality of our lives, our democratic institutions, our natural environment, and the very existence of future generations are all threatened.

Since the dawn of the industrial era, social critics have identified problems unique to industrial society. Carlyle, Thoreau, and Dostoyevski worried about the erosion of human values, while Marx and Engels emphasized the dehumanization of the masses of industrial workers and the degradation of their urban environments.

Today's citizens are faced with personal and social value and lifestyle choices as well as the need to make decisions on public policy issues that lay beyond the scope of traditional value and moral systems. According to Prewitt (1983), our lack of understanding about the new technology and its implications threatens the quality of our lives, our natural environment, our future generations, and even our democratic institutions. The extension of life by artificial means, genetic screening, strategic defense initiatives in outer space, the environmental repercussions of genetically engineered organisms-these are examples of the scientific and technological innovations about which citizens must become familiar and whose impact upon society has yet to be fully determined. Science, Technology, and Society education (STS) is an educational innovation designed to promote responsible citizenship in this technologically dominated era (Waks, 1987). STS was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s as school and college educators at the grassroots level spontaneously responded to new problems of population explosion, resource depletion, industrial pollution, and the control of nuclear weapons. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Project Synthesis, which reconsidered the goals of science education and identified the need for a science, technology, and society goal cluster, was initiated in 1980. In the early 1980s STS was endorsed by both the National Science Teachers Association and the National Science Board as a curriculum emphasis appropriate for all learners. In 1985 a national task force composed of K-12 teacher leaders in science, technology, social studies, and English education, and college teachers representing several disciplines, met at the Pennsylvania State University to set forth a clear definition of STS. The meeting was organized by the Science Through Science, Technology, and Society Project at Pennsylvania State University and funded by the National Science

The STS education movement is identified and related to the critique of technology of the 1960s–1970s. The critics of technology included the system of education in their critiques. There is a practical tension or “contradiction” in attempting to develop their insights within the curriculum routines of the schools and colleges. This tension is explored under six categories: reductive knowledge, socialization of technical modes of thinking, technicalized processes of learning, the loss of meaning, radical monopoly over learning, and the socialization of secular values.

Science, Technology, and Society (STS) education is a rapidly expanding field of study at school and college levels. Following a period of spontaneous development, there has been a convergence on goals and curriculum practices. This paper summarizes the origins, goals, and methods of STS education, and then indicates new challenges it confronts. STS aims at making citizens from all classes and groups more aware and informed about the impact of the global industrial enterprise. Curriculum formats and routines are currently organized to promote industrial production and consumption, and STS interventions accommodated to these may not prove effective in achieving the goals of STS education.

The Indian-America philosopher Sri Chinmoy Ghose has distinguished between outer silence, inner silence, and innermost silence. In this paper I explore these distinctions and their educational relevance. My main conclusions are that (a) a deep inner silence, undistracted by questions or other thoughts, is at the root of one paradigm kind of good listening in education, and (b) what Chinmoy refers to as “innermost silence” is the moral virtue of receptivity to others that sustains inner silence, even under challenging conditions, a virtue of importance in teaching and in learning from others.

What is free or open education? Is it the most valid or appropriate kind of education for our time? To these important questions there is no com­ monly accepted answer. As a rapid perusal of Jonathan Kozol's Free Schools or the back pages of the New Schools Exchange reveals, many con­ flicting doctrines are cited in defense of the idea of free schools or of open classrooms. Indeed, I believe no answer can be definitive. No dictionary, no neutral conceptual analysis will settle for us questions about what we intend in pursuing open education and whether we should continue to pursue it. We must be prepared to select and to shape a conception of education that is worth calling "free." Of course, we cannot pretend to wipe the slate clean and draw up this conception without examining and carefully criticizing existing prac­ tices and doctrines. This paper considers the distinctive liabilities imposed by the acceptance of a certain orientation toward the concept of the free school or the open classroom. This orientation I call political. It is ex­ hibited most clearly in the free-school doctrines and practices associated with Homer Lane and his great disciple A. S. Neill, and is embodied in the famous Summerhill philosophy of education, but traces of it are to be found throughout the free-school literature.' This political orien­ tation results when a notion of freedom taken from political theory is applied to education without careful consideration of the relevant dif­ ferences between political ,and educational activity; it thereby distorts our perceptions of matters important to education. Yet it must be admitted from the start that political concepts apply rather naturally in the educational sphere. Teachers are in authority over students; students are subject to the authority of teachers. These authority