Relevant History
Before considering the contents of the Blogs, a bit of history is in order that gives testimony to the existence throughout the years of a deficient public education and what has been proposed to do about it. This provides a context for understanding how this treatise addresses the shortcomings of public education especially at the elementary and middle school levels.
My Grand Uncle, my grandmother’s brother on my father’s side, lived and worked in northern New York State during the period between the Civil War and the early nineteen hundreds. He was a Baptist minister, a teacher, and a self-made architect and carpenter. He designed and assisted in the construction of the buildings on our family’s homestead built in eighteen ninety-eight, where I grew up with my eleven brothers and sisters.
He traveled on foot from community to community assisting farmers in designing and constructing their buildings. He preached at the local churches and instructed the students who attended the neighborhood schools.
His extensive records are found in his diaries that span the times between eighteen forty-five and nineteen ten, along with copies of his sermons wherein he frequently expounded upon the recurring theme that the schools were woefully deficient, and nothing seemed to be done to improve them.
In nineteen seven, Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to comment on the sorry status of education when he is quoted as saying: “You know that with all our teaching we train nobody; You know that with all our instructing we educate nobody.”
John Dewey and his followers introduced the progressive education movement in the thirties and forties hoping to do something about the deficient responses to individual learners, but they were criticized by those who claimed education seems to be doing just fine. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” became the mantra for those in charge of the traditional conventions of keeping school.
In the late eighteen hundreds a flurry of activity emerged with animal studies by Thorndike, Watson and Pavlov that laid the groundwork for believing a solution for correcting the deficiencies in education was found that became known as behaviorist theory.
Behaviorism is a belief that stems from the animal studies, claiming that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders can best be treated by altering behavior patterns. This belief later became known in an instructional tool for educating that features behavior modification put forth as the solution to the problems in education.
While the research on animals occurred around nineteen hundred, it wasn’t until the early fifties when a serious formalized proposal found its way into instruction in schools, an innovation known as “programmed Instruction” a Skinnerian invention. There was a flurry of activity surrounding that innovation.
Chief among them was the effort to establish more focused and directed instruction by insisting that lesson plans should contain behavioral objectives that would reveal the precise behaviors acceptable as evidence of learning. This has become the cornerstone for standardized testing, so precise as to accept only one correct answer for every question.
In nineteen fifty-seven, the Russians launched Sputnik creating a panic among many that we had fallen behind in teaching mathematics and science. It was determined that a reassessment of the deficient practices would require the efforts of specialists in those fields drawn from the colleges and universities of this country.
A major conference was convened at Woods Hole, Mass. chaired by a Harvard psychologist, Jerome Bruner. He published a very popular book that was purported to have been a summary of the findings of the assembled group. It was revealed in later publications that the group had not reached a consensus despite Bruner’s claims to the contrary.
The title of his book and subsequent revisions is The Process of Education, published by the Harvard University Press. His thesis stated in simplified terms that THE structures of knowledge can be honestly taught to students of any age. Clearly this came from a belief in behaviorist theory with only a mention of a concept of changes in individual development.
His writing attracted the attention of educators who purchased the book believing that since his interpretation of the work of Jean Piaget was included in his message it must be supported. Little did they realize that this effort would be institutionalized in two thousand one when No Child Left Behind became the law of this land in the form of a Common Core Curriculum to be taught to all students and standardized testing, still with us today.
Bruner’s quotations were vigorously protested by Piaget stating that his position was based on individualized developmental concepts not on the theory of behaviorism. Piaget’s work supported the proposition that individuals develop through an invariant sequence of stages or phases regarding the development of logic and logical thinking that is explained by the concepts of genetic epistemology.
The behaviorist concept that any learner can acquire an honest form of knowledge regardless of their phases of individual development prompted them to set about attempting to discredit the work of Piaget and his associates in developmental psychology with lasting effect on the current abysmal practices of educating. This has become the rationale for pushing abstract content farther and farther down into early childhood education.
In the nineties Piaget’s work was rediscovered as a legitimate framework for improving education ushered in by the constructivist movement. However, this was short lived since the behaviorist theory was and still is a fixture in our country’s educational system. Perhaps the next Blogs will change that mindset.
While the following illustration (model) addresses the contents for the study of history and geography, the same framework can be utilized in the study of the foundations for a quality education.
The center of an illustrated model would state the goal to develop self-knowledge and self-understanding, and the next ring would be divided into four sections labeled the Learner, Communication and group development, Creating knowledge utilizing the methods and materials of disciplines, and Systems theory focused primarily on systems design as a process of learning and systems analysis as a strategy for assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes. The outer circle would contain the names of theorists and a summary of their key concepts related to each of the four categories.
The illustration below represents the study of history and geography.
My Grand Uncle, my grandmother’s brother on my father’s side, lived and worked in northern New York State during the period between the Civil War and the early nineteen hundreds. He was a Baptist minister, a teacher, and a self-made architect and carpenter. He designed and assisted in the construction of the buildings on our family’s homestead built in eighteen ninety-eight, where I grew up with my eleven brothers and sisters.
He traveled on foot from community to community assisting farmers in designing and constructing their buildings. He preached at the local churches and instructed the students who attended the neighborhood schools.
His extensive records are found in his diaries that span the times between eighteen forty-five and nineteen ten, along with copies of his sermons wherein he frequently expounded upon the recurring theme that the schools were woefully deficient, and nothing seemed to be done to improve them.
In nineteen seven, Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to comment on the sorry status of education when he is quoted as saying: “You know that with all our teaching we train nobody; You know that with all our instructing we educate nobody.”
John Dewey and his followers introduced the progressive education movement in the thirties and forties hoping to do something about the deficient responses to individual learners, but they were criticized by those who claimed education seems to be doing just fine. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” became the mantra for those in charge of the traditional conventions of keeping school.
In the late eighteen hundreds a flurry of activity emerged with animal studies by Thorndike, Watson and Pavlov that laid the groundwork for believing a solution for correcting the deficiencies in education was found that became known as behaviorist theory.
Behaviorism is a belief that stems from the animal studies, claiming that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders can best be treated by altering behavior patterns. This belief later became known in an instructional tool for educating that features behavior modification put forth as the solution to the problems in education.
While the research on animals occurred around nineteen hundred, it wasn’t until the early fifties when a serious formalized proposal found its way into instruction in schools, an innovation known as “programmed Instruction” a Skinnerian invention. There was a flurry of activity surrounding that innovation.
Chief among them was the effort to establish more focused and directed instruction by insisting that lesson plans should contain behavioral objectives that would reveal the precise behaviors acceptable as evidence of learning. This has become the cornerstone for standardized testing, so precise as to accept only one correct answer for every question.
In nineteen fifty-seven, the Russians launched Sputnik creating a panic among many that we had fallen behind in teaching mathematics and science. It was determined that a reassessment of the deficient practices would require the efforts of specialists in those fields drawn from the colleges and universities of this country.
A major conference was convened at Woods Hole, Mass. chaired by a Harvard psychologist, Jerome Bruner. He published a very popular book that was purported to have been a summary of the findings of the assembled group. It was revealed in later publications that the group had not reached a consensus despite Bruner’s claims to the contrary.
The title of his book and subsequent revisions is The Process of Education, published by the Harvard University Press. His thesis stated in simplified terms that THE structures of knowledge can be honestly taught to students of any age. Clearly this came from a belief in behaviorist theory with only a mention of a concept of changes in individual development.
His writing attracted the attention of educators who purchased the book believing that since his interpretation of the work of Jean Piaget was included in his message it must be supported. Little did they realize that this effort would be institutionalized in two thousand one when No Child Left Behind became the law of this land in the form of a Common Core Curriculum to be taught to all students and standardized testing, still with us today.
Bruner’s quotations were vigorously protested by Piaget stating that his position was based on individualized developmental concepts not on the theory of behaviorism. Piaget’s work supported the proposition that individuals develop through an invariant sequence of stages or phases regarding the development of logic and logical thinking that is explained by the concepts of genetic epistemology.
The behaviorist concept that any learner can acquire an honest form of knowledge regardless of their phases of individual development prompted them to set about attempting to discredit the work of Piaget and his associates in developmental psychology with lasting effect on the current abysmal practices of educating. This has become the rationale for pushing abstract content farther and farther down into early childhood education.
In the nineties Piaget’s work was rediscovered as a legitimate framework for improving education ushered in by the constructivist movement. However, this was short lived since the behaviorist theory was and still is a fixture in our country’s educational system. Perhaps the next Blogs will change that mindset.
While the following illustration (model) addresses the contents for the study of history and geography, the same framework can be utilized in the study of the foundations for a quality education.
The center of an illustrated model would state the goal to develop self-knowledge and self-understanding, and the next ring would be divided into four sections labeled the Learner, Communication and group development, Creating knowledge utilizing the methods and materials of disciplines, and Systems theory focused primarily on systems design as a process of learning and systems analysis as a strategy for assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes. The outer circle would contain the names of theorists and a summary of their key concepts related to each of the four categories.
The illustration below represents the study of history and geography.
Two publications by this author describe his part in the cause to expose the problems and offer suggestions for corrections.
Remaking our schools for the twenty-first century – A blueprint for change/improvement in our educational systems – 2013. Available from this author
FRAUD In the shadows of our society – What is unknown about educating is hurting us all – 2022
Remaking our schools for the twenty-first century – A blueprint for change/improvement in our educational systems – 2013. Available from this author
FRAUD In the shadows of our society – What is unknown about educating is hurting us all – 2022