166. The Limits Of Behavioral Theory: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

166. The Limits Of Behavioral Theory: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Limits Of Behavioral Theory 

      The multibillion dollar school-materials industry is stuffed with curriculum  psychologized through application of behaviorist theory in its design and operation. What  these kits are about is introducing various forms of external reinforcement into learning,  based on the hypothesis the student is a stimulus-response machine. This surrender to  questionable science fails its own test of rationality in the following ways.   

     First and foremost, the materials don't work dependably. Behavior can be affected, but  fallout is often negative and daunting. The insubstantial metaphysics of Behaviorism  leads it to radically simplify reality; the content of this psychology is then always being  undermined by experience. 

      Even some presumed core truths, e.g., "simple to complex, we learn to walk before we  can run" (I've humanized the barbaric jargon of the field), are only half-truths whose  application in a classroom provoke trouble. In suburban schools a slow chaos of boredom  ensues from every behavioral program; in ghetto schools the boredom turns to violence.  Even in better neighborhoods, the result of psychological manipulation is indifference,  cynicism, and overall loss of respect for the pedagogical enterprise. Behavioral theory  demands endless recorded observations and assessments in the face of mountainous  evidence that interruptions and delays caused by such assessments create formidable  obstacles to learning — and for many derail the possibility entirely.  

     By stressing the importance of controlled experience and sensation as the building blocks  of training, behaviorism reveals its inability to deal with the inconvenient truth that a  huge portion of experience is conceptualized in language. Without mastery of language  and metaphor, we are condemned to mystification. The inescapable reality is that behind  the universality of abstraction, we have a particular language with a particular  personality. It takes hard work to learn how to use it, harder work to learn how to protect  yourself from the deceptive language of strangers. Even our earliest experience is  mediated through language since the birth vault itself is not soundproof.