For over a century, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform. Although policy talk has sounded a millennial tone, the actual reforms have been gradual and incremental. Tinkering toward Utopia documents the dynamic tension between Americans' faith in education as a panacea and the moderate pace of change in educational practices.
In this book, David Tyack and Larry Cuban explore some basic questions about the nature of educational reform. Why have Americans come to believe that schooling has regressed? Have educational reforms occurred in cycles, and if so, why? Why has it been so difficult to change the basic institutional patterns of schooling? What actually happened when reformers tried to "reinvent" schooling?
Tyack and Cuban argue that the ahistorical nature of most current reform proposals magnifies defects and understates the difficulty of changing the system. Policy talk has alternated between lamentation and overconfidence. The authors suggest that reformers today need to focus on ways to help teachers improve instruction from the inside out instead of decreeing change by remote control, and that reformers must also keep in mind the democratic purposes that guide public education.

The educational potential of the computer is already apparent, but the jury is out on how soon and how extensively the computer will be incorporated in everyday instruction. Computers are by far the most powerful teaching and learning machines to enter the classroom. Students and teachers can interact with computers in ways impossible with film, radio, and television. Depending on the software, preschoolers through graduate students can write and edit, learn languages, have a machine "tutor" in algebra, retrieve a great variety of information from electronic disks or distant libraries, receive E-mail from students a continent away, prepare multimedia reports, and use state-of-the-art technology in drafting, auto mechanics, and office work. In special education, computers help blind, deaf, and multiply-disabled students read, write, and communicate in ways that heretofore were unavailable. These various uses of the computer, valuable in themselves, will still require the integration and sense-making that a good teacher can provide. And whether teachers will embrace this new technology depends in good part on the ability of technologically minded reformers to understand the realities of the classroom and to enlist teachers as collaborators rather than regarding them as obstacles to progress.