Open Society

“Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”– Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

Skinner was hardly the first to use animals in psychological experiments that sought to understand how the learning process works. Several decades earlier, for his dissertation research, Edward Thorndike had built a “puzzle box” in which an animal had to push a lever in order to open a door and escape (again, often rewarded with food for successfully completing the “puzzle”). Thorndike measured how quickly animals figured out how to get out of the box after being placed in it again and again and again – their “learning curve.”

We have in the puzzle box and in the Skinner Box the origins of education technology – some of the very earliest “teaching machines” – just as we have in the work of Thorndike and Skinner, the foundations of educational psychology and, as Lagemann has argued, of many of our educational practices still today. (In addition to developing the puzzle box, Thorndike also developed prototypes for what we know now as the multiple choice test.)

Learning, according to Skinner and Thorndike, is about behavior – about reinforcing those behaviors (knowledge, answers) that educators deem “correct.”

Education technology has roots in war as well – in Thorndike’s development of standardized testing for World War I recruits, in the Department of Defense’s development of SCORM and in its use of computer-based training simulations. Simon Ramo, “the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile,” is also the oldest person to ever receive a patent – yes, in education technology – “for any person, business, or entity seeking information to ensure that information being presented is useful by being understood.” The pigeon. The object of technological experimentation, manipulation, and control, weaponized. The pigeon. The child. The object of ed-tech. The pigeon. The history of the future of education technology.

In our society the fiction of homo economicus manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences: Leaders, authorities, managers, superiors, social power gradients Leadership, demands, commands Management, measurement, control Incentives, aversives, punishments Business, tasks, busyness Standards, norms, benchmarks, unwritten rules Conformance, compliance, obedience Some level of standardisation and conformance is useful for collaboration at human scale (i.e. small/local scale), but the more the purpose of conformance relates to maintaining social power gradients, the greater damage in terms of loss of diversity and locally relevant knowledge. The sections below are extracts from articles that discuss the effects of behaviourist pseudoscience in parenting, education, in the workplace, in economics, and in science. The featured interview with Alfie Kohn offers an excellent introduction to behaviourism.

Create open source communities instead of walled gardens of intellectual property rights – to create a global knowledge commons and to maximise collective intelligence