Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

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meet their special needs. (p. 5)

From “Results of Use of Machines for Testing and for Drill upon Learning in Educational Psychology,” James Kenneth Little: Previous investigations of college instructional problems had (the writer felt) emphasized the following relevant points: (a) the motivating effect upon the learner of knowledge of standing and progress; (b) the value, both for motivation and for guidance in learning, of informing students specifically and immediately of their errors and their successes in their work; (c) the value in the above (and other) connections of the frequent short test, as contrasted with less frequent longer tests or examinations; (d) the great importance of continuous adjustment to individual differences not only in capacity but also in error pattern and difficulty; (e) the value, in all of these connections, of a consistent use of the make-up test. (p. 59) A comprehensive report of the work at Harvard on teaching machines and the programming of materials used within them was prepared in 1958 as a report to the Fund for the Advancement of Education. Skinner summarized the first part of this report in a symposium paper at the 1958 meetings of the American Psychological Association and shortly thereafter published it in Science [October 23, 1958 issue]. This major article, reproduced in full as the third paper in Part III, attracted wide attention to the potentialities of “teaching machines.” It also focused attention on the “ programming ” of detailed, carefully ordered learning sequences by which complex behavioral repertoires could be shaped through successive approximations. (p. 96) [emphasis in original] From Part III: “Skinner’s Teaching Machines and Programming Concepts”: Recent improvements in the conditions which control behavior in the field of learning are of two principal sorts. The “law of effect” has been taken seriously; we have made sure that effects do occur and that they occur under conditions which are optimal for producing the changes called learning. Once we have arranged the particular type of consequence called reinforcement, our techniques permit us to shape the behavior of an organism almost at will. It has become a routine exercise to demonstrate this in classes in elementary psychology by conditioning such an organism as a pigeon. (pp. 99–100) In all this work, the species of the organism has made surprisingly little difference. It is true that the organisms studied have all been vertebrates, but they still cover a wide range. Comparable results have been obtained with rats, pigeons, dogs, monkeys, human children, and most recently—by the author in collaboration with Ogden R. Lindsley—with human psychotic subjects. In spite of great phylogenetic differences, all these organisms show amazingly similar properties of the learning process. It should be emphasized that this has been achieved by analyzing the effects of reinforcement and by designing techniques which manipulate reinforcement with considerable precision. Only in this way can the behavior of the individual organism be brought under such precise control. It is also important to note that through a gradual advance to complex interrelations among responses, the same degree of rigor is being extended to behavior which would usually be assigned to such fields as perception, thinking, and personality dynamics. (p. 103) From “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching,” B.F. Skinner: