Solve for AI

Those intrigued by the possibilities of AI in classrooms often rope history into their argument. Advocates for AI’s use in educational settings suggest that it should be used, like the calculator, to “break through the paperwork” of reading and writing and allow students to concentrate on the “big questions.” They attempt to assuage worries about AI by drawing attention to the apparent silliness of the late-20th century panic around calculators in classrooms. One recent Scientific American article explained that “From the Gutenberg press to online math classes, technologies that improve access to quality learning opportunities are routinely dismissed by critics and skeptics, especially by those who hold the reins in the classroom.” The eventual adoption of calculators in classrooms, per these arguments, proved that concerns raised by educators and parents were invalid. The Scientific American authors ground their embrace of AI in the classroom with an assuring claim that “History supports this view.” 

But does it? A closer look at the contours of the calculator debate reveals that the analogy may not hold up. Survivorship bias in writing about history is a hazard of the job, made infamous by the adage, “History is written by the winners.” For historians of technology, survivorship bias emerges through explorations of technological counterfactuals: would Betamax have been a better video technology? What were the features that led internal combustion engines to overtake steam engines? As the economist Dominique Foray discussed in a 1997 article, while a “natural selection” model of technological progress would assume that we end up with the best possible technological results through a process mirroring natural selection — “the fittest survive” — in reality, technological adoption is more path dependent: “it is only the sequence of choices — driven by chance and trivial circumstances — that will eventually give to one technology the attributes of the fittest.” The history of calculators offers a case study of the contingencies involved with the adoption of specific technologies and challenges the idea that technological progress — or history — follows a linear historical path.

Pocket calculators were a long-standing goal for computing and chip-making firms. Competition amongst Texas Instruments, Sharp, Canon, Busicom, and Hewlett Packard led to a rush of innovation in the 1960s as innovations in integrated circuits made the race to produce smaller, more powerful computers possible. Introduced first in Japan in 1970 and transformed with Hewlett Packard’s HP-35 in 1972, pocket calculators initially cost hundreds of dollars. But competition was fierce and demand was insatiable. By 1976, models were available for as low as $8, and the pocket calculator entered the classroom.

Schools and teachers were left to fend for themselves. The first wave of debates over math instruction — the “new math” of the 1960s — had pitted a “constructivist” approach that, as historian Christopher Phillips wrote in his 2014 book The New Math: A Political History, focused on training students in the “structure of mathematical knowledge” against a “back to basics” approach that focused on “discipline and tradition.” After fierce arguments, math education seemed to settle into a consensus of a back-to-basics approach to skills by the 1970s, but the introduction of the pocket calculator set off the debate anew. Calculators seemed to provide incontrovertible proof that the reform argument was on to something: technology that would replace the need for arithmetic skills existed. But they also triggered successive waves of traditionalist arguments that students were becoming too reliant on technology and had little in the way of basic skills competency. 

As with many debates about American education policies, the math wars quickly became party-coded: back-to-basics became a predominantly Republican talking point, while reform was associated with progressivism and the Democrats. In this polarized environment, sensible explanations showing that “the basics” weren’t being neglected were overlooked in favor of anecdotal stories about parents who had to teach their children basic multiplication tables.

Media coverage reflected popular ambiguity about the benefits and drawbacks of calculators for children. It portrayed some teachers and administrators embracing calculators as tools of the future and recognizing calculator education as an important component of workforce preparedness. An Illinois newspaper reported that in Chicago, “science teachers look at the calculator as a ‘great technological breakthrough,’” one that “breaks through the paperwork” and allowed students who were weak in math to “concentrate on the science rather than the arithmetic.” One teacher in Cincinnati explained that calculators could provide “motivation”: “students decide they can do a problem if a machine can do it.” 

But even that teacher cautioned that calculators should only be introduced in junior high school, so that they didn’t “become substitutes for learning basic computations.” Even the most enthusiastic teachers knew that students were probably already using them for homework, even when they weren’t supposed to. One administrator, from the Princeton school district, reflected in 1976 that “the danger may be the school not dealing with the question because the kid has them anyway.” In a 1977 special editorial section on the “invasion” of calculators into Texas high school math classes, a teacher complained that using calculators would mean students’ “skills may deteriorate.” Ten years later, the debate was largely unchanged. In 1988, the Californian carried a full-page viewpoints section with debates about the merits and problems of the proliferation of calculators in classrooms. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Standards, published in 1989, argued for a reformed math curriculum that was better aligned with new career opportunities: “Businesses no longer seek workers with strong backs, clever hands, and ‘shopkeeper’ arithmetic skills.” Many parents, on the other hand, saw homework assignments that no longer resembled either the format or the content of their own educations and felt adrift. 

Since the introduction of the calculator in the 1970s, there was a consistent demand by math teachers for training in when to use calculators and when not to, how to incorporate them into lessons, and how to talk to parents about their use. An article published by the NCTM focused on teacher anxiety about calculator introduction: “teachers ask, ‘When should I use calculators?’ and ‘What should students know before I allow them to use calculators?’,” the authors noted, and “In particular, teachers want to be able to justify their answers to these questions to other teachers and parents who might be concerned about including calculator use in the middle school curriculum.”

When the NCTM adopted its 2000 Standards, reminding everyone that both basic skills teaching and more abstract thinking, facilitated by calculator use, were part of their recommended standards, its argument was that individual teachers should decide how to best integrate calculator use in the classroom. This was both a plea for parents — and journalists — to trust teachers, and a concession to the localized nature of American education. But it was clear that teachers didn’t always know how to integrate calculators into their lesson plans, and how to keep up with the ever-evolving technology. That created an opportunity.

A number of commentators have remarked on the long persistence of the Texas Instruments (TI) Graphing Calculator, TI-84 plus. They have been flummoxed by the 20-year-old technology’s continued dominance even in the age of smartphones and free online calculators. The technology in the TI-84 plus calculator is not particularly sophisticated, and hasn’t changed since it was introduced in 2004. It was neither the first mover in the space of graphing calculators, nor has it been updated with new innovations. This increasingly retro product’s endurance points to the active role of educators, textbook companies, and technology companies in shaping the adoption of the calculator in all classrooms and helping to resolve the math wars, which many historians say finally fizzled out with the implementation of the Common Core (and a set of new debates around reading and writing). 

Keith Houston’s 2023 book Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator highlighted how Texas Instruments worked with teachers to produce curricula and training resources. Recognizing that Hewlett Packard and Casio had the first mover advantage, TI instead focused on building its relationship with teachers and textbook companies. And the company found that teachers actually didn’t want the technology to advance at the rate of computing power, in part because of the relentless adaptation of lessons, but also because the debates over basic skills had shown that there was a balance to be struck. As the NCTM president, John C. Egsgard, had argued back in 1977, “You need the basics to make the calculator do what you want it to.”

And the TI-84 plus decidedly hasn’t advanced at the rate of computing power. In a relentlessly digital world, the graphing calculator works for teachers because it is a limited technology that can only be used for certain functions in a controlled environment. Twenty-year-old calculator technology is allowed in tests so that the internet or AI are not. This might be referred to as “path-dependent inefficiency”: it emerged out of a political debate in a way that is illustrative of technological advancement more broadly. It was not inevitable that calculators would end up in classrooms, but because Texas Instruments responded to the needs of teachers, within the context of a debate over the balance between teaching basic skills and using calculators to move more rapidly on to conceptual learning, students are still using them today. 

Although worries about AI in education often focus on its use to cheat in writing assignments or expedite reading (poorly), the tools pose just as much trouble for math teaching. An app store search for math games for my children turned up innumerable AI tools for “doing your math homework for you.” And as difficult as it was to reconcile the needs of teachers, students, parents, businesses, and politicians with the calculator, that reconciliation could be even more difficult with AI. The technology continues to change and develop as it is being pushed into homework settings by companies that are actively looking to shortcut learning. When the debate isn’t “teach the basics” versus “use technology to facilitate higher-order thinking,” but rather “use technology to get around thinking” versus “writing is existential,” the analogy with calculators seems strained. Still, a closer look at the contours of the historical calculator debate sheds light on the dynamics of history itself, and the extent to which the technologies we inherit from the past are products of complex contestations that could have, under slightly different social and political conditions, just as easily have turned out differently.