Cockpit cognition: Education,the military and cognitive engineering

The goals of public education, as well as conceptions of human intelligence and learning, are undergoing a transformation through the application of military-sponsored information technologies and information processing models of human thought. Recent emphases in education on thinking skills, learning strategies, and computer-based technologies are the latest episodes in the postwar military agenda to engineer intelligent components, human and artificial, for the optimal performance of complex technological systems. Public education serves increasingly as a human factors laboratory and production site for this military enterprise, whose high performance technologies and command and control paradigms have also played central roles in the emergence of the information economy.Our final hope is to develop the brain as a natural resource ... Human intelligence will be the weapon of the future.Luis Alberto MachadoThis paper will also appear, under the title Mental Material inCyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society, eds. Les Levidow and Kevin Robins, London: Free Association Press, (in press).