ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on information, choice, and rational debate as a basis for the preparation of young people of secondary age for entry into a world where information technology (IT) routinely stores, manipulates, and projects information. Birnbaum (1986) describes two kinds of response that he sees by schools to the advent of information technology. The first is to ‘accommodate the implications of IT within the existing subjects of the curriculum’. The second is to ‘establish a separate IT course’. He then provides a series of ways in which IT can be used under each traditional subject heading. The temptation is to treat computers as providers of infallible answers to questions, problems, issues. The model which more and more teachers are using to investigate the structures and processes under which they work is action research. Through such technology in conjunction with an open, facilitative attitude from teachers, children can begin educationally to form their own structures for ‘communicative action’.
