In modern usage, "Luddite" is a term describing those opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation or new technologies in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE END OF JOBS

Jeremy Rifkin

A technology revolution is fast replacing human beings with machines in virtually every sector and industry in the global economy. Already, millions of workers have been permanently eliminated from the economic process, and whole work categories and job assignments have shrunk, been restructured, or disappeared. Global unemployment has now reached its highest level since the great depression of the 1930s. More than 800 million human beings are now unemployed or underemployed in the world. That figure is likely to rise sharply between now and the turn of the century as millions of new entrants into the workforce find themselves without jobs.

Corporate leaders and mainstream economists tell us that the rising unemployment figures represent short-term "adjustments" to powerful market-driven forces that are speeding the global economy in a new direction. They hold out the promise of an exciting new world of high-tech automated production, booming global commerce, and unprecedented material abundance. Millions of working people remain sceptical. In the United States, Fortune magazine found that corporations are eliminating more than 2 million jobs annually. While some new jobs are being created in the US economy, they are in the low-paying sectors and are usually temporary.

This pattern is occurring throughout the industrialised world. Even developing nations are facing increasing technological unemployment as transnational companies build state-of-the-art high-tech production facilities, letting go millions of cheap labourers who can no longer compete with the cost efficiency, quality control, and speed of delivery achieved by automated manufacturing.

With current surveys showing that less than five percent of companies around the world have even begun the transition to the new machine culture, massive unemployment of a kind never before experienced seems all but inevitable in the coming decades. Reflecting on the significance of the transition taking place, the distinguished Nobel laureate economist Wasilly Leontief warned that with the introduction of increasingly sophisticated computers, "The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors."
http://www.converge.org.nz/pirm/nutech.htm

About Blackboards - Blackboard Technology and Chalkboard History Advances

- Chalkboard education goes back to 1801 long before whiteboards & corkboards were in existence

The blackboard revolutionized education. In our present age of continually evolving desktop, laptop and palm computers, photocopy equipment, PowerPoint presentations, video displays, interactive whiteboards, and internet access, it's startling to realize that the "technology" to first influence education was the invention of these black slate writing boards (also known as chalkboards).

Teaching could be a tedious and challenging business for American teachers before the chalkboard was a teaching tool. Whether they were in eastern academies or schoolrooms on the prairies, prior to 1801, teachers and schools had no means of visually presenting information to a roomful of students all at once, no means of presenting large concept and historical overviews for the entire class to view, grasp and discuss.

Blackboards, easels, corkboards and contemporary whiteboards may seem to us to have always been standard equipment in schoolrooms as well as business boardrooms, but none of these basic tools even existed in classrooms prior to 1801.

***snip***

Students sat in schoolrooms with handheld slates upon which to write assignments. These were usually made of a wood board painted over with black grit, though some were made of porcelain imported from the United Kingdom. Teachers would then have to go from student to student copying, for example, a math problem onto each student's individual slate. Some weren't so fortunate. ...
http://www.ergoindemand.com/about_chalkboards.htm

Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a tremendous impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by email, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web[21] with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

Published Online: June 2, 2010
Published in Print: June 10, 2010, as Progress Postponed

U.S. Graduation Rate Continues Decline
Graduation Rate Continues Decline
By Christopher B. Swanson

Every school day, more than 7,200 students fall through the cracks of America's public high schools. Three out of every 10 members of this year’s graduating class, 1.3 million students in all, will fail to graduate with a diploma. The effects of this graduation crisis fall disproportionately on the nation’s most vulnerable youths and communities. A majority of nongraduates are members of historically disadvantaged minorities and other educationally underserved groups. They are more likely to attend school in large, urban districts. And they come disproportionately from communities challenged by severe poverty and economic hardship.

According to the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center’s latest analysis of high school completion, the national graduation rate stands at 68.8 percent for the class of 2007, the most recent year for which data are available. This represents a slight drop, four-tenths of a percentage point, from 69.2 percent for the previous high school class.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34swanson.h29.html

Graduation Rates Increase Around The Globe As U.S. Plateaus

Other countries have pulled ahead, and the U.S. falls behind
By: Kavitha Cardoza // February 21, 2012

More than at any other time, getting a good job requires a strong education, especially in a global market. But in international rankings of high school graduation, the U.S. is near the bottom of the list of developed countries. It's a statistic that has not gone unnoticed by educators and policymakers at the highest levels, and many of them are now looking to other countries to see where American schools can improve.

In 2009, President Obama spoke to students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, carrying a strong message: dropping out is not patriotic.

"If you quit on school, you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country," he said.

The president has said other countries were "out-educating us." It seems they're also out-graduating us.
http://wamu.org/news/morning_edition/12/02/21/graduation_rates_increase_around_the_globe_as_us_plateaus