Why Schools Fail

Bruce Goldberg

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9781882577392
• eBook ISBN: 9781937184650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

It is becoming increasingly clear that government schools have failed. SAT scores are low, dropout rates are staggeringly high, and violence is often rampant. In Why Schools Fail, Bruce Goldberg explains the many reasons for the failure of public schooling and offers a prospective remedy to the educational mess in which the United States finds itself.

1. Is Educational Theory Scientific?

Horace Mann was one of the first educators to claim that the process of formal schooling is based on scientific knowledge of how a child's mind develops. Without that knowledge, he said, one would have no right "to attempt to manage and direct ... a child's soul."¹ Given that Mann is praised by contemporary educators for his insight and for the "modernism" of his views,² it is somewhat disconcerting to discover that the science that he saw as guiding the process of schooling was phrenology, the now entirely discredited pseudo-science of bumps on the skull. The book he regarded as containing the knowledge necessary for training children's minds was The Constitution of Man by the Scottish phrenologist George Combe. "Its philosophy," Mann said, "is the only practical basis for education."³

Combe held that the mind consisted of some 30 faculties or "propensities," such as benevolence, combativeness, self-esteem, and veneration. Each of those faculties was located in a particular part of the brain. As the faculty developed, the area of the brain in which it was located got larger, pushing out the skull. Using that "scientific" knowledge, one could cultivate the desirable faculties and suppress the undesirable ones by using an objective method, that is, by measuring the "bumps" on the skull to determine how well the process was proceeding.

The Behaviorists

The claim that schooling is guided by scientific knowledge has been made by countless educators, but it has never been supported by any evidence. Just as Mann thought that phrenology provided the scientific basis for training children's minds, many educators in this century believed they had found the key in behaviorist psychology.

It has become clear, however, that the behaviorist psychologists, in claiming to have a scientific understanding of human mental development and a scientific foundation for schooling, vastly overstated their case. Their claims were nothing if not grand. One of the leading behaviorists, Clark Hull, said that on the basis of psychological laws, stated entirely in terms of stimuli and responses, he would provide a scientific explanation of "familial behavior, individual adaptive efficiency (intelligence), the formal educative processes, psychogenic disorders, social control and delinquency, character and personality, culture and acculturation, magic and religious practices, custom, law and jurisprudence, politics and government."⁴ Hull's actual achievement was somewhat more modest. It consisted, as the philosopher R. S. Peters pointed out, of nothing but "some simple postulates which gave dubious answers to limited questions about particular species of rats."⁵

Behaviorism has been the most influential psychological theory among educators in the present century. The theory, originally advanced by Johns Hopkins psychologist John B. Watson in 1913, claimed to place psychology, for the first time, on a scientific foundation.⁶ For psychology to become a genuine science alongside physics and biology, Watson argued, it was necessary to abandon the concepts and methods of the discipline as it had been practiced up till then. According to the traditional, so-called introspective or mental-istic view, psychology was the study of mental states and processes, such as consciousness in general, thinking, remembering, having an intention, desiring, and willing. Its goal was to discover the nature of those processes and the laws governing their causal interactions. The principal method of investigation was introspection. By carefully attending to what actually took place in the mind when he or she thought or remembered and so on, the perceptive psychologist could discover important truths about what is involved in mental functioning. In addition, the psychologist could use as data the reports of subjects asked to describe their own mental experiences. William James's Principles of Psychology, a widely read work of the time, illustrated the introspective approach. In his chapter on "The Stream of Thought," for example, James described in great detail how the different parts of a thought ebb and flow as the thought passes through the mind.

Watson's contention was that introspection is unreliable and unscientific. It is unreliable in that introspective reports vary widely from individual to individual. It is unscientific in that reports of subjective experiences are, by their very nature, unverifiable. Watson argued further that the data gathered by introspective methods did not enable psychologists to predict behavior.

The alternative to introspectionism is for psychology to focus on what is objectively observable, namely, how organisms behave in response to stimuli. For several years Watson experimented on rats learning to run mazes. He concluded that, in terms of the concepts of "stimulus, response, habit formation, habit integration and the like," one can fully explain how animals learn and how they acquire their repertoire of behavior.⁷

The fundamental explanatory concept in accounting for both animal and human behavior was the conditioned reflex. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had shown that animal responses could be "conditioned." If one paired a stimulus, such as a bell, with food, a dog's natural salivary response to food would soon be evoked by the bell alone. The bell became a conditioned stimulus and salivation a conditioned response.

Watson conducted a series of experiments on conditioned responses in human beings. He was able to show that, by pairing a sound with an electric shock, people could be conditioned to fear the sound alone. The goal of psychology, he held, was to provide laws describing such stimulus-response connections for human behavior in general. Then, "given the stimulus, psychology can predict what the response will be; or, on the other hand, given the response, it can predict the nature of the effective stimulus.⁸ In possession of such laws, the psychologist would have a technology of behavior control. "Behaviorism states frankly," Watson said, "that its goal is the gathering of facts necessary to enable it to predict and to control human behavior."⁹

Over the next two decades Watson wrote numerous articles and books describing the social and educational implications of the new science of human behavior. Not only in scholarly journals such as Psychological Review, but also in such mass-circulation magazines as Harper's, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and McCall's, Watson expressed views on a wide variety of topics: the nature of marriage; how to raise children; the origin of fears; and the usefulness of psychology in prisons, in schools, and for directing society generally.

The central idea throughout was that, since a human being is "nothing but an organic machine," we are able "to predict that machine's behavior and to control it as we do other machines."¹⁰ Viewed in that way, psychology had great social utility. It could provide, Watson said, "laws and principles whereby man's actions can be controlled by organized society .... If it is demanded by society that a given line of conduct is desirable, the psychologist should be able with some certainty to arrange the situation or factors which will lead the individual mo...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. IS EDUCATIONAL THEORY SCIENTIFIC?
• 2. EDUCATIONAL RHETORIC VS. SCHOOL REALITY
• 3. THE BASICS: MATHEMATICS
• 4. THE BASICS: READING
• 5. WHY EDUCATIONAL REFORMS HAVE FAILED
• 6. ON MEMORIZING
• 7. SHAPING HUMAN BEINGS AND PSEUDOSCIENCE
• 8. EDUCATION AND INDIVIDUAL CHOICE
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• About the Author