161. Behaviorists: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

161. Behaviorists: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

 

Behaviorists  

 

     To understand empty child theory, you have to visit with behaviorists. Their meal ticket  was hastily jerry-built by the advertising agency guru John Watson and by Edward Lee  Thorndike, founder of educational psychology. Watson's "Behaviorist Manifesto" (1913)  promoted a then novel utilitarian psychology whose "theoretical goal is the prediction  and control of behavior." Like much that passes for wisdom on the collegiate circuit, their  baby was stitched together from the carcasses of older ideas. Behaviorism (Thorndike's  version, stillborn, was called "Connectionism") was a purified hybrid of Wilhelm  Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig and Comte's positivism broadcast in the pragmatic idiom     of the Scottish common-sense philosophers. We needn't trace all the dead body parts  pasted together to sigh at the claim of an originality which isn't there — reminiscent of  Howard Gardner's fashion as seer of multiple intelligence theory — an idea as ancient as  the pyramids. 

 

      Behaviorists read entrails; they spy on the movements of trapped and hopeless animals,  usually rats or pigeons. This gives an advantage over other psychologists of standing on a  pile of animal corpses as the emblem of their science. The study of learning is their chief  occupation: how rats can be driven to run a maze or press a bar with the proper schedule  of reward and punishment. Almost from the start they abjured the use of the terms reward  and punishment, concluding that these beg the question. Who is to say what is rewarding  except the subject? And the subject tells us more credibly with his future behavior than  with his testimony. You can only tell whether a reward is truly rewarding from watching  future behavior. This accurate little semantic curve ball allows a new discipline to grow  around the terms "positive reinforcement" (reward) and "negative reinforcement"  (punishment). 

 

      Behavior to behaviorists is only what can be seen and measured; there is no inner life.  Skinner added a wrinkle to the simpler idea of Pavlovian conditioning from which  subsequent libraries of learned essays have been written, when he stated that the stimulus  for behavior is usually generated internally. In his so-called "operant" conditioning, the  stimulus is thus written with a small "s" rather than with a Pavlovian capital "S." So  what? Just this: Skinner's lowercase, internal "s" leaves a tiny hole for the ghost of free  will to sneak through! 

 

      Despite the furor this created in the world of academic psychology, the tempest-in-a-  teapot nature of lowercase/uppercase stimuli is revealed from Skinner's further assertion  that these mysterious internal stimuli of his can be perfectly controlled by manipulating  exterior reinforcements according to proper schedules. In other words, even if you do  have a will (not certain), your will is still perfectly programmable! You can be brought to  love Big Brother all the same. 

 

      The way I came to the attention of Dr. Keller's teaching assistants was by writing a  program to cause coeds to surrender their virginity behaviorally without realizing they  had been scored, with an operant conditioning program. My blueprint delighted the  assistants. Copies were prepared and sent informally to other colleges; one went, I  believe, to Skinner himself. When I look back on my well-schooled self who played this  stupid prank I'm disgusted, but it should serve as a warning how an army of grown-up  children was and still is encouraged to experiment on each other as a form of higher-level  modern thinking. An entire echelon of management has been trained in the habit of  scientific pornography caught by the title of the Cole Porter song, "Anything Goes." 

 

      Behaviorism has no built-in moral brakes to restrain it other than legal jeopardy. You  hardly have to guess how irresistible this outlook was to cigarette companies, proprietary  drug purveyors, market researchers, hustlers of white bread, bankers, stock salesmen,  makers of extruded plastic knick-knacks, sugar brokers, and, of course, to men on     horseback and heads of state. A short time after I began as a behaviorist, I quit, having  seen enough of the ragged Eichmannesque crew at Columbia drawn like iron filings to  this magnetic program which promised to simplify all the confusion of life into  underlying schemes of reinforcement.