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Values Education and Technology: The Ideology of Dispossession. Emberley Peter C.. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 330p. $75.00.

It is perhaps appropriate that this book appeared in a year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the first and to date last military deployment of nuclear weapons. The five decades since Hiroshima and Nagasaki have seen a succession of astonishing technological triumphs, from jet propulsion to human organ transplantation and the electronics "revolution." For many on the planet, life in the wake of World War II has meant being perpetually dazzled by the pace of technological innovation. Yet this aspect of our human condition has been at best a mixed blessing, often evoking Rousseau's paradox of modernity: What improves humanity may at the same time corrupt us. The moral questions posed by many aspects of technological "progress" are profound; they have, however, yet to receive full attention in political theory. Coincident with an acceleration of technological change across fifty years of the nuclear age has been an ongoing sense of "crisis" in North American education. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Johnny couldn't read and the schools couldn't produce math and science majors at a pace equal to the Soviets. "Sputnik shock" reverberated in schools and universities in those days, just as battles over the curriculum, metaphorically expressed in terms of "culture wars" or "back to basics" resonate today. Values Education and Technology represents both an entry into the contemporary debates and a meditation on aspects of the contemporary crisis of technology. As such, it is an unusually ambitious and at times provocative work. Emberley takes on several theories of "values education" that were widely in vogue for a decade or so in the 1970s. He is highly critical of the substitution of "values" for classical accounts of ethics and morals; he links the dehumanizing and deracinating impetus of these pedagogical theories to parallel processes inherent in the larger "technological environment." He argues that values, education, and technology "cooperate in eliminating the human subject, whose longings and needs sustained modernity for three centuries with ideas of autonomy, individual responsibility, and personal merit" (p. 193). The subsumption of the traditional curriculum by curricula founded not on classical verities but rather on "contemporary self-interpretation" puts politics and society in a state of "extreme danger brought on by dispossession" (p. 255). The strongest sections of the book are those that provide detailed analyses of particular models of values education. By turn, the "values analysis" program forwarded by the Association of Values Research (AVER), the "moral development approach" of Lawrence Kohlberg, and the "values clarification" techniques associated with Louis Raths, Sidney Simon, Merril Harmin, and Howard Kirschenbaum are dissected with a keen eye to uncovering not only their metaphysical underpinnings (Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, respectively) but also the darker "flip sides" of these putatively progressive programs. Emberley scrupulously moves beyond commonplace charges of "relativism" to engage the various proposals on philosophical terrain. Each, in turn, is shown to be founded not on authentic freedom, but on manipulation and dispossession of what makes human beings most themselves. A theme of restoring "possession," or mutuality founded on belonging to a particular community, runs throughout the book. Emberley promotes an "ethic of possession" inspired by the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin, whose ideas, taken together, provide models of human comity based on "principles of human order . . . conveyed by ethical and moral life" that can be "understood as rhythms in the movement between political and intellectual life" (p. 93). This associative model might appear to offer a means of theorizing political and educational practices, which, if not exactly redolent of communitarianism, remain nonetheless founded in actual human experience. But here the specificity drops out of Emberley's analysis (as it is also absent in Arendt and Voegelin). What principles? Held by whom? If political and intellectual endeavors should dance in tandem to some rhythmic beat, will it invariably take two to tango? In other words, are politics and intellectual activity linked essentially or contingently? On whose plan? Answers to these questions would invigorate, for well or ill, the very concept of "possession" that frames Emberley's call for restoring an authentic moral sense to educational, political, and intellectual endeavors. Yet without any suggestion as to who might possess—or be possessed by—what (let alone how, where, or when), the "ethic of possession" remains strikingly empty.