Confessions of a Modern Luddite: A Critique of Computer- Based Instruction

Abstract

In these more enlightened times, we no longer hang opponents of technical revolutions or even transport them to foreign lands because all we have to do is whisper the accusation: Luddite! Thus branded, these individuals automatically become ignorant, naive, backward, destructive people, who are opposed to "progress". However the insight provided by historians who have studied this movement shows that it was not the new technology to which the Luddites objected, but the societal changes that were being imposed on them from above by proponents of this technology. It was not the threat to full employment that concerned them, but the threat to the traditional wages a labourer could earn. They did not ask for a return to old fashioned work, but to "full fashioned work at the old fashion'd price."