Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

61

The Sick Sixties : c. 1961

of rigor is being extended to behavior which would usually be assigned to such fields as perception, thinking, and personality dynamics. (p. 103)

1961

P ROGRAMMED L EARNING : E VOLVING P RINCIPLES AND I NDUSTRIAL A PPLICATIONS (F OUNDA tion for Research on Human Behavior: Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961) edited by Jerome P. Lysaught was published. Appendix III contains significant material from this book. An excerpt from the introduction by Thomas H. Miller follows: To introduce the subject, we would like to have each of you work through the first lesson of Dr. B.F. Skinner’s course in psychology. We would hope, incidentally, that a portion of the material is somewhat new to you so that some learning will actually take place in your encounter with the subject matter. Further, we hope it will demonstrate certain phenomena that will be spoken of repeatedly today, such as effective reinforcement of the learner and progress at the individual rate. Imagine yourself to be a freshman student at Harvard. You are taking, for the first time, a college course in psychology. This is your first day in that course. Your introduction to the course consists of the presentation of the programmed learning sequence on the next pages. The directions are simple. You should read the first stimulus item, S-1, consider it, and then construct in your own words the best possible answer. As soon as you have done this, turn the page and compare your answer with the answer listed at R-1, the first response item. Proceed through the program, going on to S-2 on the next page. Under the section entitled “Principles of Programming,” written by Robert Glaser, we find the following excerpts to be revealing: It is indeed true that this book would never have been conceived without the well-known and perhaps undying work of Professor Skinner…. It is largely through Professor Skinner’s work that all this theory and excitement about teaching machines and programmed learning has come about. The essential task involved is to evoke the specific forms of behavior from the student and through appropriate reinforcement bring them under the control of specific subject matter stimuli. As a student goes through a learning program certain of his responses must be strength ened and shaped from initial unskilled behavior to subject matter competence.... Our present knowledge of the learning process points out that through the process of reinforcement, new forms of behavior can be created with a great degree of subtlety. The central feature of this process is making the reinforcement contingent upon performances of the learner. (Often the word “reward” is used to refer to one class of reinforcing events.)... The term “programming” refers to the process of constructing sequences of instructional material in a way that maximizes the rate of acquisition and retention and enhances the motivation of the student.... A central process for the acquisition of behavior is reinforce ment. Behavior is acquired as a result of a contingent relationship between the response of an organism and a consequent event. In order for these contingencies of reinforcement to be effective, certain conditions must be met. Reinforcement must follow the occurrence of the behavior being taught. If this is not the case, different and perhaps unwarranted behavior