School’s Out: Networked Digital Technology and the Conservative Attack on Public Education

In 1992, the Hudson Institute research fellow Lewis Perelman made the case that networked communication technologies would destroy and replace public schools. He argued that classrooms and teachers “have as much place in tomorrow’s learning enterprise as the horse and buggy have in modern transportation.” With these claims, Perelman fused longstanding conservative concerns about public education with a futurist enthusiasm for digital technology. The new digital technologies, he argued, were revolutionary precisely because they promised to undermine the authority of public schools. Perelman contributed to a broader set of efforts undertaken by a network of elite right-wing figures and institutions at the end of the twentieth century. At the Hudson Institute, the Discovery Institute, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation, writers and policymakers such as Perelman, George Gilder, and Newt Gingrich articulated a vision of the future free from the morally corrupting influence of public schools. They particularly focused on three aspects of public education curricula that had come under fire from conservatives over the previous decades: first, the incorporation of the theory of evolution into science classes; second, the expansion of sex education programs that went beyond abstinence; and third, the efforts to add multicultural perspectives into classrooms. Collectively, they articulated a vision of the emerging World Wide Web and "cyberspace" that would undermine, rather than expand, the authority of public schools and libraries. In the process, they shaped broader cultural ideals and set policy agendas for the future of digital technology.