The Leipzig Connection:  Sabotage of the US Educational System -- Chapter 4

The Leipzig Connection: Sabotage of the US Educational System by Paolo Lionni

Chapter 4. Mice and Monkeys (excerpts)

"It was the hiring by Russell of another practitioner of the new fad, however, that was to result in Columbia's becoming the connection for a fatal dose of Wundtian psychology into the mainline of American education. Edward Lee Thorndike was trained in the new psychology by the first generation of Wundt's protégés. He graduated from

Edward Lee Thorndike

Wesleyan University in 1895, after having studied with Wundtians Armstrong and Judd. He went to graduate school at Harvard, studying under psychologist William James, a transitional figure whose later influence depended, to a substantial extent, on his subtle furthering of physiological psychology (under the guise of Pragmatism). While at Harvard, Thorndike surprised James by doing research with chickens, testing their behavior and pioneering what later became known as "animal psychology": As briefly stated by Thorndike himself, psychology was the science of the intellect, character, and behavior of animals, including man. "Thorndike applied for a fellowship at Columbia, was accepted by Cattell, and moved with his two most intelligent chickens to New York, where he continued his research

and earned his Ph.D. in 1898. Thorndike's specialty was the "puzzle box," into which he would put various animals (chickens, rats, cats) and let them find their way out by themselves. His doctoral dissertation on cats has become part of the classical literature of psychology."

"After receiving his doctorate, he spent a year as a teacher of education at Western Reserve University, and it wasn't long before Cattell advised Dean Russell to visit Thorndike's first classroom at Western Reserve:

Although the Dean found him 'dealing with the investigations of mice and monkeys,' he came away 'satisfied that be was worth trying out on humans."

"Russell offered Thorndike a job at Teachers College, where the experimenter remained for the next thirty years."

"Thorndike was the first psychologist to study animal behavior in an experimental psychology laboratory and (following Cattell's suggestion) apply the same techniques to children and youths; as one result, in 1903, he published the book Educational Psychology. In the following years he published a total of 507 books, monographs, and articles."

"Thorndike's primary assumption was the same as Wundt's: that man is an animal, that his actions are actually always reactions, and that he can be studied in the laboratory in much the same way as an animal might be studied. Thorndike equated children with the rats, monkeys, fish, cats, and chickens upon which he experimented in his laboratory and was prepared to apply what he found there to learning in the classroom. He extrapolated "laws" from his research into animal behavior which he then applied to the training of teachers, who took what they had learned to every corner of the United States and ran their classrooms, curricula, and schools on the basis of this new "educational" psychology."

In The Principles of Teaching based on Psychology (1906), Thorndike proposed making "the study of teaching scientific and practical." This is his definition of the art of teaching:

... the art of giving and withholding stimuli with the result of producing or preventing certain responses. In this definition the term stimulus is used widely for any event which influences a person, - for a word spoken to him, a look, a sentence which he reads, the air he breathes, etc., etc. The term response is used for any reaction made by him, - a new thought, a feeling of interest, a bodily act, any mental or bodily condition resulting from the stimulus. The aim of the teacher is to produce desirable and prevent undesirable changes in human beings by producing and preventing certain responses. The means at the disposal of the teacher are the stimuli which can be brought to bear upon the pupil, the teacher's words, gestures, and appearance, the condition and appliances of the school room, the books to be used and objects to be seen, and so on through a long list of the things and events which the teacher can control.

"These are the origins of conditioning and the later work of behavioral psychologists such as Watson (who received his Ph.D. from Dewey at the University of Chicago in 1903 with a thesis entitled "Animal Education") and Skinner. Thorndike based conditioning on what he called the "law of effect," which held that those actions and behaviors leading to satisfaction would be impressed, or stamped in, on the child, and those leading to unsatisfactory results would be stamped out. Thus the only way to strengthen a child's "good" response is by reinforcing it, and the only way to eliminate a child's "bad" response is by denying it."

"This theory creates certain problems for the educator. Should the child, for example, not want to learn his multiplication, the teacher will have to find some way of making multiplication pleasurable and rewarding, or the child just won't learn it. Similarly, if the child enjoys tossing pencils at his classmates, he will have to be instructed, by denying him pleasure, that such a "behavior" isn't permissible. This thinking favors a society which operates more on the basis of gratification than on the basis of reason or responsibility. Children expect to receive what is pleasurable, and what they desire, because they have learned in school that what is pleasurable is good, and what isn't pleasurable, isn't good. This is an inheritance from the stimulus-response teaching developed by Thorndike and transmitted to hundreds of thousands of teachers through the medium of "educational" psychology. Previously, of course, good behavior was considered its own reward; the idea of rewarding a child for behaving like a human being would only occur to someone who supposes that the child is basically an animal and would have seemed like an open invitation to blackmail to any sensible 19th-century parent."

What was the purpose of education, according to Thorndike?

Education is interested primarily in the general interrelation of man and his environment, in all the changes which make possible a better adjustment of human nature to its surroundings."

This is also the view of Dewey and other Wundtians - that man is a social animal who must learn to adapt to his environment, instead of learning how to ethically adapt the environment to suit his needs and those of society. Individualism and the developing of individual abilities give way to social conformity and adaptation; the product of education becomes "well-adjusted" (conditioned) children.

"Thorndike also had specific views about education in the basics - the 3R's:

Traditionally the elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R's, and closely related disciplines ... Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value... Elimination of unessentials by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."

"Besides de-emphasizing the study of the educational basics, he outlined what he considered to be the three main functions of the elementary school:

(1) to provide for each child six years of experience designed to enable him to make at each step in the period adjustments to the most essential phases of life ... To adjust this general education to each child requires a considerable degree of specialization in accordance with individual differences. Consequently the elementary school has a second function, namely (2) to determine as accurately as possible the native intellectual capacities, the physical, emotional, temperamental, recreational, aesthetic, and other aptitudes of children. Since some pupils will find it necessary or advisable to enter a vocation in the middle teens, a third function is essential in some degree, namely, (3) to explore the vocational interests and aptitudes of pupils and to provide some measure of vocational adjustment for those who will leave school at the earliest legal age."

"The child, much like the animal, is what he has experienced, tempered by the type and condition of his brain and nervous system. If his nervous system is in good order, then the child will be able to respond properly to the stimuli to which he is exposed. It is, of course, in the child's earliest years that the nature of the stimuli is most important, as these will most influence his character and personality."

"Despite the careful control of stimuli and the conditioning of behavior, however, something might still go wrong. With all stimuli theoretically the same for a group of children, the continued difference in individual learning rates and abilities would indicate something physiologically different between youngsters. Hence, Thorndike's second point; psychological testing is used to determine just what the differences are. Testing each child regularly and thoroughly, in this view, allows one to determine individual learning disabilities or deficiencies. Thorndike's premise here is that intelligence is permanently set before the student enters school. It is an easy conclusion, and it absolves educators from the responsibility for any of their students not learning, for if half the students in a classroom learn, that is proof enough that the teacher is teaching correctly. That the other half doesn't learn is obviously not the teacher's fault, as this half heard what the first half heard, and experienced the same stimuli. There must be something wrong with the second half, and psychological tests will determine what it is. Before 1900, the way to identify a good teacher was to determine that his students, at the end of their studies, knew a subject. With the emergence of psychological testing, however, teaching standards became dependent upon variables inherent in the nervous systems of the children, and thus out of the control of the teacher."

"The failure of many children to learn brings us to Thorndike's third point. He concluded that some students just won't make it, and that it's better to determine through educational testing who they will be, early enough so that they can be shunted into useful vocational training. Here, Thorndike reflects, once again, a synthesis of the revised psychology of Wundt and the soft socialism of Dewey:

When all facts are taken into account, we believe it will be found that the best interests of the individual and society will be served by providing a certain number of the pupils least gifted in intelligence with the equipment needed to begin their vocational career by the completion of the junior high school period or even earlier in a few cases. Other individuals will advance their own welfare and that of society by securing but one more year, others by two, others by three additional years. Thus although the great majority of children should spend some time in the junior high school, not all of them should be expected to continue to the completion of the senior-high-school course. Each child should have as much high school work as the common good requires."

In summary, a German experimental psychologist was convinced that men are animals who can be understood bv analyzing what they experience. His conclusions and methods were imported into an expanding American educational system and disseminated throughout that system to teachers, counselors, and administrators. Within half a century juvenile delinquency would run rampant, illiterates would pour out of the schools, teachers would no longer learn how to teach, and generation after generation of adults, themselves cheated out of the fruits of a good education, would despair of any solution to the morass of "modern" education.

(End of Chapter 4)

Continue with Chapter 5. A Gift From God

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The Leipzig Connection by Paolo Lionni - the complete book with more details & facts about the scam known as modern education and psychology.

Suggested Reading List - the Demise of the Educational System - OBE (Outcome-Based Education), NEA (National Education Association), educational psychology, German psychology & influences, demise of public education, educational sabotage, Wundt, Pavlov, Dewey, Skinner, Watson.