Computer literacy

The suddenly popular movement for educational reform in the early 1980s coincided with the mass marketing of the personal computer as a needed new tool and the consequent surge in computer sales. Through the mass media, computers had became part of popular mythology, and people believed that they needed to know about these machines: they purchased them for their homes and businesses, they watched documentaries about them on television, and they began thinking that their …

…competition in their industries, claimed that new and faster forms of transportation and communication made it impossible for individual farmers and artisans to compete. (Spring 1972, page 9) They just couldn't realize the economies of scale necessary to utilize the modern technological developments. "The public schools of the twentieth century were organized to meet the needs of a corporate state and consequently, to protect the interests of the ruling elite and the technological machine." (Spring 1972, pages 1-2)