169. Dr.
Watson Presumes: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
Dr.
Watson Presumes
Leapfrogging 163 years, Dr. John B. Watson,
modern father of behaviorism, answered
that question this way in the closing paragraphs of his Behaviorism
(1925), when he appealed to parents to
surrender quietly:
I am trying to dangle a stimulus in front
of you which if acted upon will gradually change this universe. For the universe will change
if you bring your children up not in the
freedom of the libertine, but in behavioristic freedom.... Will not
these children in turn with their better
ways of living and thinking replace us as society, and in turn bring up their children in a still more scientific
way, until the world finally becomes a place fit for human habitation?
It
was an offer School wasn't about to let your kid refuse. Edna Heidbredder was
the first insider to put the bell on
this cat in a wonderful little book, Seven Psychologies (1933). A psychology professor from Minnesota, she
described the advent of behaviorism this way
seven decades ago:
The simple fact is that American
psychologists had grown restive under conventional restraints. They were finding the old
problems lifeless and thin, they were "half sick of shadows" and... welcomed a plain,
downright revolt. [Behaviorism] called upon its
followers to fight an enemy who must be utterly destroyed, not merely to
parley with one who might be induced to
modify his ways.
John B. Watson, a fast-buck huckster
turned psychologist, issued this warning in 1919: The human creature is purely a
stimulus-response machine. The notion of consciousness is a "useless and vicious" survival
of medieval religious "superstition." Behaviorism does not "pretend to be disinterested
psychology," it is "frankly" an applied science. Miss Heidbredder continues: "Behaviorism is
distinctly interested in the welfare and
salvation — the strictly secular salvation — of the human
race."
She saw behaviorism making "enormous
conquests" of other psychologies through its "violence" and "steady
infiltration" of the marketplace, figuring "in editorials,
literary criticism, social and political
discussions, and sermons.... Its program for bettering humanity by the most efficient methods of
science has made an all but irresistible appeal
to the attention of the American public."
"It has become a crusade," she
said, "against the enemies of science, much more than a mere school of psychology." It has
"something of the character of a cult." Its adherents "are devoted to a cause; they are in
possession of a truth." And the heart of that truth is "if human beings are to be improved we must
recognize the importance of infancy," for in infancy "the student may see behavior in
the making, may note the repertoire of reactions a human being has... and discover the ways in
which they are modified...." (emphasis
added) During the early years a child may be taught "fear,"
"defeat," and "surrender" — or of course their opposites. From "the
standpoint of practical control" youth was the name of the game for this aggressive cult; it
flowed like poisoned syrup into every nook and
cranny of the economy, into advertising, public relations, packaging,
radio, press, television in its dramatic
programming, news programming, and public affairs shows, into military training,
"psychological" warfare, and intelligence operations, but while
all this was going on, selected tendrils
from the same behavioral crusade snaked into the Federal Bureau of Education, state education
departments, teacher training institutions,
think tanks, and foundations. The movement was leveraged with
astonishing amounts of business and
government cash and other resources from the late 1950s onwards because the payoff it promised to deliver was vast.
The prize: the colonization of the young before
they had an opportunity to develop resistance. The holy grail of market
research.
Back to Rousseau's Emile. When I left you
hanging, you had just learned that Emile's
"liberty" was a well-regulated one. Rousseau hastens to warn
us the teacher must take great pains to
"hide from his student the laws that limit his freedom." It will not
do for the subject to see the walls of
his jail. Emile is happy because he thinks no chains are held on him by his teacher/facilitator. But he is
wrong. In fact the tutor makes Emile entirely
dependent on minuscule rewards and microscopic punishments, like changes
in vocal tone. He programs Emile without
the boy's knowledge, boasting of this in asides to the reader. Emile is conditioned according to
predetermined plan every minute, his
instruction an ultimate form of invisible mind control. The goals of
Rousseau's educational plan are
resignation, passivity, patience, and, the joker-in-the-deck, levelheadedness. Here is the very model for
duplicitous pedagogy.
This treating of pupils as guinea pigs
became B.F. Skinner's stock in trade. In a moment of candor he once claimed, "We can
achieve a sort of control under which the controlled nevertheless feel free, though they are
following a code much more scrupulously than
was ever the case under the old system." Rousseau was Skinner's
tutor.
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