Avoiding the Tyranny of Technique in the Classroom: Applying Jacques Ellul’s Warning to Education

Originally published in Classis
Volume XX, No. 3

By Joshua Pauling

In 1954, French theologian, sociologist, and legal scholar Jacques Ellul published a massive tome entitled La Technique. Translated into English ten years later as The Technological Society,¹ the book warned that principles of technique and efficiency were coming to consume all realms of life and swallowing up a uniquely human way of being in the process. Ellul digs much deeper than just technological changes and new gadgets. He lays the axe to the root of what he sees as the real problem: technique itself, which he defines as the “totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency…in every field of human activity.”² Ellul connected the dots between things like factory optimization according to efficiency, government bureaucracies centralizing control, humanity’s changing relationship with one another and the world due to new technologies, and how all such related shifts were undermining human life and thought.

As the ever-growing techno-tentacles of modern society further instantiate the principles of technique and efficiency into our lives, Ellul’s concern still holds: that we might be painting ourselves into a corner as computational understandings of human thought and mechanistic views of man swallow up other ways of knowing and being. With the capability to measure, record, and analyze everything—when data, information, and algorithms rule the day—even classical education can fall prey to the tyranny of technique. Ellul’s concerns deserve a fair hearing among classical educators today, if for no other reason than to help ensure that education remains oriented properly toward human goods, humanely scaled.

Ellul and Technique

When Ellul refers to “the technological society,” he is not simply referring to a society that uses machines and complex tools; much more than that, he is referring to the pervasive yet subtle underlying ideologies that take root in society as traditional ways of life are overshadowed by the principles of technique and efficiency, which those machines and tools represent and by which they function.

To put it another way, in Ellul’s view, a technological society is not a society that simply uses machines. It is a society made for machines. It is a society where machines become the paradigm for understanding and framing everything else, from our own bodies to our brains, from governments to natural ecosystems. That is technique. Think of the ways we describe our bodies as “well-oiled machines” or “flesh robots.” So too our brains are frequently compared to “computers” or “information processors.” This is the trajectory Ellul saw in the mid-20^th century as industrial and technological change was causing social life and self-understanding “to be reconsidered in terms of the machine” as “technique integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs.”³ Human interests and needs are eclipsed by the needs of the machine. Humans end up submitting and structuring their thinking and life patterns to fit into the technological society, with the machine as the standard.

Ellul then turns the screws further by arguing that we can no longer speak of a clear demarcation between man and machine because “when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance. It is no longer face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him.”⁴ Perhaps most stunning here is that Ellul wrote this in 1954, long before the possibility of personal computing, wearable or implantable technologies, or screen-based digital devices—all of which so easily become reality-mediating mechanisms that extend technique’s totalizing reign. More from Ellul:

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment but also to modify man’s very essence…to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.… He has been liberated little by little from physical constraints, but he is all the more the slave of abstract ones. He acts through intermediaries and consequently has lost contact with reality.⁵

And the trends have only continued. Think of how easily technique takes over even in our personal lives. Do you have a problem with time management? There’s an app for that. How about your weight? There’s an app for that, too. Do you have a problem with anger management? Read this self-help book. How about focus and attention? Employ these techniques to self-optimize. Notice how even the language of behavior management and “optimization” employs a concept from the industrial economy to address human problems—not good, according to Ellul. The focus on efficiency, productivity, optimization, and self-improvement easily overwhelms us and eclipses human-to-human, hand-to-hand, and heart-to-heart approaches to life.

Alan Noble explores Ellul’s concept of technique further in his recent book You Are Not Your Own and shows how it creates an environment of competition for attention and success, turns efficiency into a “judgment of human value,” which “morally malforms both the winners and the losers.”⁶ In other words, when we apply the unflinching standards of efficiency and technique to the mess of human experience, we risk dehumanizing ourselves into efficiency machines or technique-bots. As more aspects of the human experience are quantified into the newest data points for analytics, “they overwhelm us with the sense that all of life is essentially a competition.”⁷ Noble laments where this leads:

Technique promises a better world but produces only a more efficient world with different problems. Technique is then used to solve the problems that technique unintentionally created, which only produces new unintended consequences. The further it goes, the more absurd it becomes and the more helpless we feel to stop it.⁸

And that leaves us in a very inhumane place. “Men now live in conditions that are less than human,” Ellul wrote over half a century ago. “Life in such an environment has no meaning.”⁹ And if soaring anxiety rates, deaths of despair, and the growing crisis of meaning and loneliness are any indication, he was right.

How Then Shall We Learn?

Ellul warned of similar trends in the world of education which was being influenced by progressive pedagogy in his native France and other modernized nations around the globe. Ellul thought that some goals of progressive education had a place, compared to past “dismal schools where teachers were enemies and punishment was a constant menace; of narrow, barred windows, gloomy brown walls, and uncomfortable benches hollowed out by generations of bored students.”¹⁰ But Ellul questioned the overall direction of progressive education as the “ancient and familiar categories of school life…were suddenly overthrown by the extension of a series of techniques.”¹¹ What took primacy was the socialization and adjustment of the child, who “must be ‘relaxed,’ and enjoy himself; he must exist in a ‘balanced environment,’ get rid of his ‘complexes,’ and ‘play while he is learning.’”¹² Ellul viewed this “educational procedure” as a “highly refined technique” which makes the “most exacting demands on the technician himself, who must indeed be a remarkable pedagogue to be able to apply it.”¹³

Not only that, the dream of “happy children” and democratic values based on progressive education’s “new psychopedagogic technique” doesn’t even make students truly happy anyway. Instead, “it makes men happy in a milieu which normally would have made them unhappy, if they had not been worked on, molded, and formed for just that milieu. In other words, what looks like the apex of humanism is the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them.”¹⁴ So much for a freeing, joyful, liberating education. Instead, we end up with more techniques and more mechanistic button-pushers. Ellul concludes that “the new pedagogical methods correspond exactly to the role assigned to education in modern technological society,” where “education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.” Even, “the human brain must be made to conform to the much more advanced brain of the machine. And education will no longer be an unpredictable and exciting adventure in human enlightenment, but an exercise in conformity and an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world.”¹⁵

What does this mean for those of us in the classical world? Any model or form of education is prone to an unhealthy relationship to technique and efficiency of which Ellul warned—even classical education. If we just implement this curriculum sequence, then everything will work just right. If teachers just use these techniques, then students will listen and behave. If we just educate all our kids in the “virtues,” then they will be good people. If we teach everyone Latin and logic then society will be so much better. Certainly, there is a valid place for mastering teaching techniques, designing a well-ordered curriculum, and running a classroom efficiently. But we must maintain the human aspects of teaching and learning, which frequently transcend technique and are sometimes anything but efficient.

Applying Ellul to Education: Human Goods, Humanely Scaled

Ellul’s core insights concerning education are that proper human formation is not easily quantifiable with numbers, nor is it mechanistically ensured via certain techniques. Education is much more than a transaction. Educators, parents, and administrators should consider the following to help their students (and themselves!) stay anchored in the humane orbit of the real. To help translate Ellul’s somewhat cryptic and abstract points, I’ll employ the cultural critic Neil Postman, who drew heavily on Ellul’s work and applied much of it to education.

Be a technological skeptic.
Postman clearly built on Ellul in his 1992 book Technopoly, which was the term Postman coined to describe a stage of civilization where the control of industrial resources, the reform of financial institutions, and the reorganization of social systems are all based on the findings of technologists and engineers. This, Postman argues, degrades education into a transactional and mechanistic system, driven by accompanying educational narratives, which he called the myths of technological progress and economic utility. Within such a framework, education is primarily directed towards economic ends, where students are fungible commodities being prepared for the 21st-century workforce. Swimming in this cultural milieu means we frequently absorb this way of thinking without even realizing it. That is why a dose of technological skepticism is necessary and helpful.

Channeling Ellul, Postman suggests serious thought be undertaken before any technology is employed in the classroom: “Every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore requires scrutiny, criticism, and control.”¹⁶ Whether it be a film strip or video clip, a computer or Chromebook, a Smartboard or smartphone, educators cannot be too cautious about implementation and should always maintain “an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.”¹⁷ This means our classrooms shouldn’t always be buzzing or beeping or blinking with ubiquitous blue lights or alluring backlit slabs of glass we call screens.

Don’t just teach how to use technology; also teach how it uses us.

Understanding, like Ellul, that technology is never neutral, Postman suggests that the subject of technology itself be taught historically. Students need a serious form of technology education, but not in how to use technology—frequently students are already technologically more adept than their teachers, and predicting which skills will still be relevant when students reach adulthood is nearly impossible. Instead, by tackling the philosophy and history of technology, students can learn of humanity’s confrontation with nature and of technology’s impacts on culture and society. Postman makes technology itself an object of inquiry so that students are “more interested in asking questions about the computer than in getting answers from it.”¹⁸

This concern gains importance as the realities of large language models like ChatGPT and other forms of machine learning (which I think is a more accurate term than “artificial intelligence”) gain traction and offer up full-fledged answers, fully written papers, and much more than search engines ever could. Educators must especially be prepared to engage their students in how to use and not use such things, and how to think about them from a Christian perspective using classical philosophical categories to better understand their inherent limitations.¹⁹

Remember students can’t be quantified fully by a number.
There is a tendency to measure everything in education. Standardized tests, numerical grades, and more. But what does it really mean to say that Johnny got an 87% in US History this year? Can one’s knowledge of a subject be so neatly captured in this way? Are my rubrics and grading metrics really precise enough to capture the essence of a human being and their knowledge of a certain subject down to a percentage point? What about intellectual growth over the semester? What about older methods of student evaluation that involved more direct human-to-human engagement?

Classical education isn’t immune from this tendency towards quantification. I found myself thinking about this at a recent classical education conference organized by one of the well-known publishers of classical education materials. Perhaps it was because Ellul was fresh in my mind, but there seemed to be a growing focus on measurement, standardized tests, using this lesson plan format, employing that technique, and formulating these specific policies. Of course, such things have their place, especially as schools grow in size. But that makes it all the more important to remember Ellul’s warnings. We need to ensure that students are always perceived as full persons, even in how we evaluate their work.

Follow the master.

Our goals as educators are much broader than helping students get good grades, win that college scholarship, or land a high-powered career. We are forming human beings: shaping and molding them toward the true, the good, and the beautiful. Such human goods as cultivating biblical wisdom and virtue, and preparing students for their lifelong vocations as members of families, churches, and communities go far beyond productivity, efficiency, and transaction which reign in the technological society. Education requires a human being directly caring for and engaging with another human being through discussion, listening, eye contact, and much more—very simple and low-tech things. It is in this modeling on a human scale that education’s imitative nature is on full display and fully unleashed. Here we find the ancient idea of the teacher surrounded by his disciples, coming together in discussion around topics and texts under the master’s wise tutelage.

“You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things,” explains philosopher Michael Polanyi. “By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known by the master himself.”²⁰ Modeling and imitation are powerful forces in human formation, revealing an inherent moral dimension to education. The unique nature of the teacher-pupil relationship must not be lost. David Hicks reminds us that “classical education’s emphasis on mastering an inherited body of knowledge rather than on developing a happy, well-adjusted child makes possible a profound and intimate relationship between the schoolmaster and his pupils. Knowledge—the activity of learning—gives the teacher and student a common ground for friendship while accentuating their unequal status.”²¹

Carve out spaces and times for restful reflection.

In the rush of the school day, is there ever a moment for reflecting upon a new insight or reveling in a deep truth? Is the school day itself one large technique designed to just get students through like an assembly line product? We must find room for fruitful rest. A school must leave some nooks and crannies for contemplation that birth new insight, some sanctified spaces for silence that bring forth peace, and some alcoves for awkward boredom that blossom into creativity. We all need moments of meditation where we are uninterrupted by flashing screens, notification dings, PowerPoint presentations, the ringing of bells, or the ticking of clocks. It is in such moments and places where we encounter the Divine, the profound, the sublime, and yes, darkness too, and truly grow as persons.

Ellul’s warnings about technique and efficiency drive us back to education’s low-tech core as a better way to secure human flourishing amid a technological society. We are brought back to each other and the topics and texts that have stood the test of time, and their ordinary transmission through dialogue and discussion where words are spoken, read, written, and shared.

When education’s driving force is human-to-human interaction—small in scale, personal in nature, historical in focus—we can better treasure the fully human ways of knowing and being that were familiar to generations past. These are the foods that nourish and strengthen humanity to resist technique’s tyranny. It is vital that we retain a humane education, where students and teachers, parents and children are fully present with one another, gathered around the perennial subjects and questions that form humanity’s Great Conversation. “At stake is our very life, and we shall need all the energy, inventiveness, imagination, goodness, and strength we can muster to triumph in our predicament,” Ellul reminds us. “Each of us, in his own life, must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants. Each man must make this effort in every area of life, in his profession and his social, religious, and family relationships.”²²

Notes