An essay on the future role of technology in education stresses three conclusions. First, changes in the teacher's work resulting from the growth of educational technology will be neither as dramatic nor as rapid as is commonly forecast in the literature. Second, many of the benefits alleged to accompany the advent of teaching machinery will either fail to materialize or prove to be mixed blessings. The teacher is held to be all in all more opportunistic, flexible, efficient, and less expensive than equivalent machines even where they are possible; machine teaching will probably be efficient only for reading and mathematics. Third, although the expanded use of machines in the classroom poses some unique problems for educators, a more fundamental question concerns the extent to which a mechanistic ideology should be allowed to permeate our view of the educational process. Much of the current respect for machines is faddist. Teachers resist the new technology because they are more intimately aware of the inefficiences involved in its use. (BB)