Our Time Amongst the Luddites
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Our Time Amongst the Luddites: Reflections on Three Recent Works About Luddism and Education
By Charles Logan, Phil Nichols, and Antero Garcia
Back in Fall 2021, I (Charles) organized a reading group for Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, a book that everybody should read. Civics of Technology didn’t exist at the time, but a short-lived precursor did: the Critical EdTech Scholars Alliance (CETSA). Under the auspices of CETSA, we gathered over several sessions to discuss Watters’ book. The meetings resulted in a reading guide and, when Civics of Technology launched in 2022, a blog post and Inquiry Design Model lesson plan for the book.
Something else emerged from the Teaching Machines reading group: a correspondence between myself and Phil, who’d attended the reading group, about the Luddites — 19th century textile workers who famously resisted automation — and their lessons for educators today. I was a second-year Ph.D. student at the time and our exchanges eventually led Phil to share a call for proposals for a special issue on generative AI from Learning, Media and Technology (LMT). Phil mentioned that he had also been in conversation with Antero about the Luddites, and thus, three of us decided to join forces, inaugurating what would become a series of articles exploring Luddism and its implications for education.
Over the past two years, we’ve co-authored three pieces about the Luddites and what they offer educators and students in the fight against automation in schools:
The book review, “Inspiration from the Luddites: On Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine” in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).
The academic article, “Generative AI and the (Re)turn to Luddism” in Learning, Media and Technology.
The essay, “Teach Like a Luddite” in Phi Delta Kappan.
Separately, I published the paper, “Learning About and Against Generative AI’s Ecologies and Developing a Luddite Praxis” in the Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences. The paper was deeply influenced by Phil and Antero’s work on the platformization of education.
Given all that time thinking and writing about the Luddites, we wanted to use this post to reflect on this work and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Phil and I answered the questions separately, and you’ll see where we overlap and diverge as we consider our time amongst the Luddites.
1) How has working on these articles affected your thinking about the Luddites and Luddism, especially in the context of education?
Charles: I remember an early conversation we had about a central challenge when invoking the Luddites. While the Luddites could destroy a gig mill or power loom and rest knowing they’d slowed, however temporarily, the spread of automating machines in one specific factory, contemporary, networked digital devices and other technologies aren’t so easily smashed. Or, they might be easily smashed — I imagine shattering a school-issued Chromebook humming with student monitoring software is quite satisfactory — but to walk away thinking, “That’ll show Google,” felt to us more like a performance of Luddism than an organized political movement against automation and technological capitalism. I don’t mean to suggest that performance shouldn’t be part of a Luddite praxis. Strategic playfulness was part of the historical Luddites’ repertoire of practices and, as we argue in the Kappan piece, can be part of a Luddite praxis in education too.
Instead, I’ve come to view the potential incongruity of historical Luddism with our modern times as an invitation to be creative, develop a multitude of situated tactics, and to do so in community with others. Automating technologies will continue to evolve, and when they do, networks of resistance sustained by relations of care can be ready to respond both to the technology, and perhaps more importantly, to everybody affected by the technology and those deploying it. That’s what working on these pieces has reinforced for me: I want to put my energies into strengthening existing networks of resistance and building new ones that insist upon our common dignity…and maybe we crack a few Chromebook along the way too.
Phil: Writing these pieces has helped me think more carefully about the work the idea of “the Luddites” does— not just as a historical reference, but as an organizing device that can be used, by different people in different moments, to coordinate opposition to technological inevitability. I think each article allowed us to engage a different dimension of that work.
The LARB piece let us extend an emerging public discourse about the Luddites — emblematized by Brian Merchant’s book, Blood in the Machine — to pressing questions related to education. The Learning, Media, and Technology article allowed us to step back and historicize the contemporary interest in the Luddites. An important takeaway from this was the recognition that there are multiple, conflicting intellectual traditions that have invoked the Luddites as inspiration. This allowed us to ask, what does it mean that people keep returning to the Luddites as a symbol of resistance? And what are the risks of collapsing different forms of technological critique under the banner of “Luddism”? The Phi Delta Kappan article, by contrast, bracketed these nuances and offered a more polemical argument for why Luddism could be a useful stance for practicing educators today. If our LMT article demonstrated that it’s never uncomplicated to self-identify as a member of a historical collective, the Kappan piece suggests that there can be strategic benefits to doing so: identifying as a Luddite carries with it a kind of transhistorical permission structure for rejecting inhumane technologies — something that could be incredibly valuable for educators facing a relentless push to incorporate AI into their classrooms.
Taken together, I think these articles have helped me see both what the idea of Luddism can and can’t do for us in this moment. There is much to be gained from invoking it, but it also inherits contradictions that shouldn’t be papered over. If Luddism serves as a rallying cry for bringing researchers, teachers, and advocates together, the real work lies in grappling with what we do next.
2) What’s one way you’re living a Luddite praxis in and/or beyond education?
Charles: I’ve become the annoying person who, upon hearing somebody say, “AI is coming for your job,” raises his hand to say, “Well, actually, it’s not AI that’s coming for your job. It’s management.” Which is to say that I’m trying to channel the Luddites’ economic and political analysis, with its dual attacks on specific automating machinery and the industrialists responsible for installing the machinery in the first place.
This focus on technology, labor conditions, and power is also shaping how I’m currently designing a summer professional development session for in-service educators. The session is focused on AI technologies, but I’m not interested in creating a kind of product testing experience that functions to socialize educators into using AI technologies “responsibly” in their classrooms. I think such approaches are difficult to distinguish from company efforts to capture education and transform educators and students into lifelong product users. I do, however, want to meet teachers where they are and respond to their needs. In practice, this might mean asking participants to produce a lesson plan with Gemini and discussing the outputs. I see my Luddite praxis emerging in what we discuss when we discuss AI-generated lesson plans. Yes, I want to talk about issues such as disciplinary knowledge. I also want to expand the discussion to consider how turning to synthetic text extruding machines, a description of LLMs that I first heard from Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, shapes and redefines a teacher’s identity and labor and why administrators might be encouraging teachers to embrace these products instead of, say, fighting to improve the material working conditions of educators.
Phil: One concrete way is that I’ve almost entirely migrated away from using my university’s learning management system. When Instructure partnered with OpenAI last summer, it raised some serious ethical concerns about intellectual property, student data, and intellectual freedom — especially given how the platform consolidates syllabi and course readings in a single location that can be screened for “sensitive” topics. Since then, I’ve experimented with independently hosted course websites and secure shared folders on my university’s Box account as alternatives.
I’ve also been reintroducing more material formats into my teaching. I’ve encouraged students to read on paper and made close reading and annotation more central to instruction — at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In many ways, this is a return to my experience as a middle school English teacher — there’s something powerful about having a shared physical object and a set of embodied practices that everyone in the room is engaging with simultaneously. This semester, I’ve asked students to keep a Commonplace Book, where they copy key quotes from course readings and add reflections throughout the semester. These become resources that we can return to week after week and mine themes and questions that can help to drive our larger class conversations. I’ve been really encouraged by the response to this assignment.
3) What’s something that remains unresolved for you about Luddism in education or that you still have questions about?
Charles: I’ve been thinking a lot about the current backlash against digital technologies in schools and how this moment presents an opportunity for some Luddite-inspired education and organizing with my fellow caregivers. Increasingly, parents and caregivers are challenging edtech by opting their children out of school-issued devices and writing open letters to their local leaders and school administrators opposing the adoption of AI products in schools. (We have our own parents page on the Civics of Technology website with resources for caregivers interested in pushing back against edtech.) I am here for caregivers organizing at multiple scales to learn about the platformization of education and the political economy of edtech. I view this learning as essential for a broader Luddite praxis that demands we ask what kinds of relationships we want our children to develop with technology in schools–and then to pursue those relationships alongside our children and their teachers.
I worry about how Luddism might be stretched to include the “back to basics” rhetoric that is sometimes threaded through the techlash discourse, rhetoric that I see as in alignment with groups like Moms for Liberty and their anti-democratic political project. It’s worth repeating: the Luddites weren’t anti-technology. Without a more nuanced discussion of what technologies we’re using in schools and to what ends, I’m concerned that calls for banning technologies might provide cover for visions of education that foreground individual mastery rather than the collective sensemaking essential to a multicultural democracy; deny young people access to often life-saving information; and prop up so-called Classical education where, if videos are allowed in school, they’re produced by PragerU Kids.
Phil: For me, the unresolved question is about the multivalence of Luddism as a political project. As an immediate resource, there is no doubt that it is useful for organizing popular rejection of technologies that are inhospitable to human flourishing. But there are real differences in how people arrive at this position, and those differences sometimes matter. As our LMT article showed, Luddism has been attached to both reactionary and progressive causes. It can be used to defend human labor and collective self-determination, or it can be used to promote individual liberty and a retreat from public life. These may seem like subtle distinctions, but they become meaningful in the context of education.
A right-wing group, for instance, might embrace a form of Luddism because it aligns with their interests in shielding children from objectionable content they might encounter online. But they are not especially invested in protecting the dignity of teaching as a profession or the integrity of public education as an institution — which is what draws other people (like me!) to the concept. This raises hard questions about what kinds of common cause can be found in resisting the incursion of Big Tech into schools. For some, the incursion may be further rationale for privatizing education and creating bespoke alternatives that haven’t been captured by technology companies; for others, it may highlight the need for more robust legal and policy guardrails for protecting public education from private interests.
So the question I keep coming back to is, how big can the Luddite tent be before it becomes self-undermining? This was one of the lessons (or cautions) we explored in “second-wave Luddism” in our LMT article, and it remains to be seen how the present wave will reconcile these tensions.
4) We worked on these Luddite projects over several years. I wonder if you have any reflections about our collaborative process and how we approached the question of publication across different kinds of venues meant for different kinds of audiences.
Charles: I’ll share two reflections. First, I want to acknowledge how gracious Phil and Antero were in taking me seriously as a collaborator. Maybe all those dogged emails wore down Phil, or maybe they helped strengthen a relationship grounded in our early discussions of Teaching Machines. Probably both. So I think one lesson is for other doctoral students wondering how to connect and write with faculty outside their institution.
A second lesson concerns all the writing that gets cut during the revision process. You don’t always need to kill your darlings, uprooting your favorite sentences and paragraphs and tossing them to molder on a heap of rotten words. Sometimes those darlings can be replanted in something new. For example, our LMT piece was really two pieces at first. We tried to stitch together a history of the three waves of Luddites with an attempt to theorize a Luddite praxis in education. Perhaps we knew our Frankenstein’s monster of a paper wasn’t long for this world, and if there was any doubt, the reviewers let us know we should’ve followed our gut. We decided to keep the history and lop off the praxis portion. Eventually, we expanded the praxis section for our Kappan piece. For me, one takeaway is to be creative with your rejects. Yes, producing the rejects provides invaluable thinking–and those rejects can find new life by reconsidering questions related to argument and audience.
Phil: I’ve really appreciated how the process forced us to wrestle with the fact that different audiences may need to hear different things about the Luddites. The LARB audience might be sympathetic to the Luddite cause but not expressly invested in questions about K-12 education. The Kappan audience — practicing teachers and school leaders — may need more overt arguments about the historical precedents for rejecting technologies that are presented to schools and districts as “the future.” And the LMT article allowed us to complicate and historicize these tendencies for an academic readership that may or may not be familiar with the Luddites, raising more nuanced questions about the uses and limits of Luddism as an organizing strategy.
But I also think it’s true that we were drawn to each venue, in part, because we needed to work through our own thinking about what Luddism means for education research and practice — and I’m sure there are still some shades of difference in how each of us thinks about the subject. Getting to wrestle with these tensions alongside Charles and Antero, two people whose intellects and perspectives I deeply respect, has been a real gift. The collaboration has been a model of the kind of collective thinking that, in some ways, mirrors what we’re arguing for in the articles themselves.