Our founding fathers believed that freedom – especially freedom of thought and mind –
creativity, and humanity were essential spiritual values that would unleash American
greatness. For more than two centuries, they were proven right, as these values prevailed
in the U.S. and allowed us to become the great nation that we once were. But in the past 50 years, we’ve lost sight of them, and now are being eclipsed by countries we used to tower over.
To find our way back, we need to get a better handle on what has gone wrong. One factor
that is often overlooked, but that arguably is the most important driver of our decline, is
how we educate our young. Our educational system has devolved into one based largely on
behaviorism. Behaviorism in key ways is the antithesis of freedom of thought and mind.
Once our educational system became imbued with the philosophy of behaviorism, whose
best-known proponent here is B.F. Skinner, the effects on our democracy have been
corrosive.
The most comprehensive discussion of behaviorism in relation to U.S. education is found in
the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (1999), written by Charlotte Thomson
Iserbyt, a policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She looks at the writings of
Skinner along with works by Ivan Pavlov from 19th-century Russia and John B. Watson,
considered the father of behaviorism in the U.S. While there are many differences among
the three, they share one common view: the notion that human beings are behavioral
machines who learn by responding to particular stimuli. As behaviorism has permeated
U.S. education, students at all educational levels have become stimulus response machines, a dynamic that has infected multiple areas of U.S. life.
The following quotations help explain the problem. In his introduction to the book, Francis
Schaeffer (a brilliant Christian apologist who might be considered America’s version of C.S.
Lewis) wrote: “Within the Skinnerian system there are no ethical controls; there is no
boundary limit to what can be done by the elite in whose hands control resides.” Does this
sound exaggerated? Tragically, it’s not. Consider the following chain of events: A top CIA
operative, who speaks for the elite, puts together a list of stimuli – i.e., viewpoints – he
wants the U.S. public to believe and respond to. He introduces them to a group of top
journalists he’s gathered together. The points are echoed as stimuli in the country’s leading
media outlets. In turn they function as stimuli to people reading or watching the media,
who respond by buying it hook, line, and sinker, which in turn means that senseless wars,
from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Ukraine, are overwhelming approved.
A second quote from Iserbyt’s book, from the book’s final page, also struck me. It was
inspired by one of the most honored academics of our time, James Billington, who served as Librarian of Congress under five presidents. Based on Billington’s thinking, Iserbyt
concludes:
“The United States is engaged in war… it has been fought in secret – in the
schools of our nation, targeting our children who are captive in our classrooms.”
In 2002, Skinner was named the most influential psychologist of the 20th century – ahead of Freud, Piaget, and William James. He was certainly influential, a prolific writer who, among other things, wrote a lot about education, and also was the author of the well-known novel Walden 2. But as a believer in determinism and a card-carrying atheist, Skinner was a man whose thinking at best was incomplete and at worst was completely wrong.
On a general level, if as he believed, creative output is predetermined, you could ask why
you’d even bother to try to create. On a more specific level, you could ask what were the
stimuli that led to Skinner’s own creativity. The most productive part of Skinner’s academic
career came in his 35 years, between 1948 and 1973, as a Harvard professor. By the time evidence of the decline in American education became clear in the mid-1960s, Skinner’s discoveries had already been made and widely accepted, establishing him as a prominent, leading American psychologist.
Decline and renormalization of American test scores
The pernicious effects of acceptance of Skinner’s ideas on education became apparent in
the mid-1960s, when SAT scores began a dramatic decline. Between 1965 and 1980, the
average math score fell by more than 50 points. Sometime in the 1980s a number of
renormalizations of the test took place, and average scores climbed back to nearly pre-
1965 averages. What does renormalization mean? In a classroom setting, renormalization
would be assigning a grade of, say B, to what previously would have been a C. Renormalizations are now the norm for SATs as raw scores continue to lose ground.
Skinner’s destructive role in education is also on full display in one of the most pressing
problems today in the U.S., the shortage of skilled labor. The test that relates most closely to the skills needed in today’s workplace is the 8th-grade math proficiency test. We looked at some of these tests. The questions included some glaring errors – for example, mis-defining a function, a mistake in logic in how a question was phrased, and in one case, an outright wrong answer. When you find these kinds of errors in the questions themselves, you know you have a problem. That between 2019 and 2022 the percentage of students who passed the test declined from an already low 33% to an abysmally low 26% is, to say the least, disheartening – and clear evidence that fixing the U.S. education system should be a huge priority.
In part 2 of this blog, we’ll continue looking at the role of education.
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