BBA BOOK TOO LONG

BBA BOOK TOO LONG Behaviorism was a dominant midcentury theory of psychology which argued that humans ought to be studied in terms of their externally-visible behavior, both because the inner workings of the human mind are unknowable, and because they are unnecessary for an account of how individuals respond to stimuli. Stimulus-response studies are effective at explaining the behavior of animals such as birds, and many animals can be trained to produce elaborate scripts of behavior through reinforcement learning. In one famous example, pigeons were trained to play a ball game where the winner was rewarded with food. Researchers such as B.F. Skinner argued that the complexities human behavior could ultimately be explained as elaborate scripts developed through intricate training. Behaviorism was positivist in that it prioritized what can be objectively measured, and devalued the inner life as beyond the scope of science. Given a behaviorist model of learning, it follows that schools ought to provide an optimized environment for reinforcing desired behaviors. This theory of schooling, which sees education as something done to students, is called Instructionism. Instructionism has been described as a factory model of schooling: children are turned into workers and citizens, with efficiency being the primary metric. Instructionism was closely associated with Taylor’s research on workplace efficiency, characterized by breaking tasks down into routines of smaller steps, and the use of measurement to optimize the performance of these routines. Instructionism became the dominant model of schooling in the United States during the postwar years, just as corporations became the dominant forces in civic and political life. Callahan (1964) documents the historical process by which school boards became dominated by bankers and businessmen, and their emphasis on measurement, efficiency, and centralized control defined the criteria by which school principals were assessed. Nobody today would pitch an education policy in terms of improvements to an assembly line, but proposals to measure teaching in terms of value-added, and talking about students falling out of a leaky pipeline are not far off. There is a symbiosis between theories of learning which focus on learning to follow routines, and theories of schooling aimed at preparing workers for a future whose outlines have already been drawn. Underlying both is an epistemology which sees knowledge as existing apart from any particular mind, something useful and valuable which can be transmitted, delivered, or installed in students. Behaviorism, with its reluctance to get involved with the inner life, views knowledge in terms of routines someone is able to perform. (This perspective is currently enjoying a revival in the form of competency-based education.) Instructionist schooling defines ahead of time what students ought to know and be able to do. Because the same knowledge and skills are delivered to all the students, instructionist assessment values clear, objective, and standardized measurement of the results. Students do not participate in deciding what ought to be learned, nor what kinds of futures ought to be enacted.