In the early 1960s, a young generation of western cyberneticians criticized programmed instruction (PI) for being “too trivial and too determined”, as PI was not yet able to adequately adopt to the learners’ progress, motivation and activity. Furthermore, the British cybernetician and psychologist Gordon Pask questioned the behaviorist foundations of PI on the basis of machine and human interaction. To realize an adaptive teaching system, he argued, it was necessary to gather information from the learning student, which then should enable the machine to alter its configuration. By focusing on the revision of the so called ”Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operation (PLATO)“, a teaching terminal computer invented at the University of Illinois, the paper will critically engage with these attempts to individualize the learning process through technology, which aimed at making standardized, uniform, synchronized schooling obsolete. The paper will argue that the cyberneticians’ reinvention of the teaching machine resulted in a simplified and literally solidified definition of ‘liberation’ from schooling and mass education. Yet the idea of a better, faster and personalized learning process did not, however, abolish its goal orientation. For this reason, adaptive teaching systems should better be described as a means to improve self-control; and self-control can be understood as a core concept of the colonization of the mind in the ‘free’ western world of the 1960s. The archival sources cover Gordon Pask’s letters and manuscripts (from the University of Illinois and from the University of Vienna) as well as a selection of his publications and the letters of his wife, Elizabeth Pask.