Correction Appended

TECHNOLOGY was once taught in American schools almost as an afterthought -- tucked into science or social studies classes and limited to talks about inventions and inventors. Not anymore. As pressure mounts to shore up the nation's eroding technological edge, public schools are scrambling to play catch-up. Many efforts to upgrade technology instruction fall short of recommendations from the Federal Government and private groups.


In East Syracuse, N.Y., junior high school students learn about the various applications of technology, from computerized payrolls to the Patriot missiles used in the Persian Gulf war. InCupertino, Calif., elementary school students are taught simpler lessons about technology by producing book reports using video cameras. In Houston, technology lessons in middle schools are dispensed through the dismantling of items like clocks and blenders, with students learning about the parts and the science that makes them work.

"There is a big movement to change the teaching of technology," said Bill Aldridge, executive director of the National Association of Science Teachers. Major Science-Class Changes

Not since the 1957 launching of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviets stirred passage of the National Defense Education Act have American science classes been at the center of so much change, educators and analysts said. Since the mid-1980's, schools increasingly have addressed the teaching of technology. In addition, the science teachers' association is in the third year of a six-year project to develop a national model that ties together the various sciences and the role they play in technology.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has initiated a 25-year project, in its fifth year, to improve Americans' technical skills, produce more scientists and teach students certain technologies and sciences.

"The effort is being driven by a confluence of events," said F. James Rutherford, the association's chief education officer, a former Assistant Education Secretary and co-author of the book "Science for All Americans" (Oxford University Press, 1990). To begin with, he said, "teachers are realizing that something has to be done and that previous efforts haven't worked."

As the nation is battered by Japanese technological know-how, schools have borne the brunt of the blame, and teachers have been forced to upgrade now seemingly elementary computer literacy programs with meatier technology courses or to create separate technology curriculums. But even as technology has grown in importance in curriculums, Mr. Rutherford lamented, "There's always some resistance to change."

Mr. Aldridge, for example, said he was taken aback at opposition from teachers and textbook representatives when, in recent hearings before the Texas Education Agency, he testified to the need for improved science and technology instruction. Some teachers were uneasy about teaching a subject for which they were ill prepared, he recalled, while textbook companies argued that their books would not fit a new curriculum.

Finances can also be an obstacle to updating technology curriculums. Many school systems, for example, cannot afford computers and other technologies that make hands-on lessons possible. Textbooks that are quickly outdated in discussions about technology are of little help to teachers, many of whom also admit that their own technological ignorance -- and sometimes phobia -- further handicaps their efforts.

Such hurdles, though, are slowly disappearing. In East Syracuse, for instance, students at Pine Grove Junior High School receive a wide-ranging grounding in technology from John Almonte, the technology teacher. "Our school district has made a real commitment to make sure that our kids are prepared for the job market," said Mr. Almonte, whose class, an elective, is taken daily by 15 students, each with a computer.In his lectures, Mr. Almonte shows and tells students that technology is present in just about every aspect of daily life. In a recent class, for example, he engaged students in a discussion on how atoms split in an atomic bomb, making it such a lethal weapon. "The thrust in education is to try an integrated approach," said Mr. Almonte, who sometimes uses current events in computer and technology lectures to illustrate technology's role. 'It Makes Everything Easier'

For students like Greg Brandon, Mr. Almonte's class has been a revelation. "I think technology is very important with the world changing," said Greg, a ninth-grader, who is considering a career in the computer industry. "It makes everything easier."

For instance, he said he had learned how technology enabled Patriot missiles to track Iraqi Scud missiles used in the Persian Gulf war, and about technological advances in computer chips and circuit boards that enable computer companies to shrink the size of once- bulky computers.

Lydia Brandon, Greg's mother and a teacher's aide, exults at her son's technology literacy and maintains that the knowledge is "important because of the way technology has so advanced the world."

In Houston's John J. Pershing Middle School, the thrust is on integrating the teaching of all the sciences using laboratory work, but technology is also addressed. In Grace Beam's science class, for instance, seventh-graders pull apart appliances like blenders and clocks to see how they work.

"I want them to see how it was put together, how it works and what kinds of changes we might see," said Mrs. Beam, who then assigns her young students the task of using the parts to build a machine or gadget of their own invention.

Students like Hayley Gough and Kelley Whitmer, both 12 years old, said they better understood how sciences were interrelated because of the lab work. And they could see the role the sciences play in the development of technology. "Technology is upgrading things," said Kelley, who described how computers talk to one another through modems and how technology turned watches hands into digital numbers.

The school, part of the National Association of Science Teachers project, is in the first year of revamping the science curriculum for the seventh grades so that "we're formally teaching the cross-connections between the sciences," said Claude H. Cunningham, the principal and a former middle school science teacher.

Mr. Cunningham said educators had long had a difficult time teaching the cross-relationships, such as the weight of water and the physics needed to calculate that weight. That has partly been the fault of curriculum structure, where courses are taught independently of one another. But integrating science courses will help students comprehend technology better, he added.

Said Mr. Cunningham: "If you don't teach the cross-connections, you are teaching isolated skills and isolated ideas and you won't bring to bear other ideas."

Photo: Dismantling a radio, students at a middle school in Houston learn about its components and how they work together. (Sam C. Pierson for The New York Times)