B. Heinsfeld

From Machines to Algorithms: A Short History of Technical Rationality in Education

This brief historical essay argues that one of the most consequential shifts in educational technology has been conceptual rather than technical: the ascendancy of technical rationality as the design logic of pedagogy. Tracing three moments (mechanical instruments, computational systems, and algorithmic infrastructures) the piece highlights how optimization, management, and prediction have tended to reframe what teaching and learning are imagined to be. By reading past innovations as carriers of rationalities, not just tools, the essay urges educators to recognize—and exnovate—inherited assumptions that privilege automation and control over interpretation and encounter.