gat

Some parts of the country were more resistant to the dumbing down of curriculum and the
psychosocializing of the classroom than others, but by a process of attrition Prussianization gained
important beachheads year by year—through private foundation projects, textbook publishing,
supervisory associations, and on through every aspect of school. The psychological manipulation
of the child suggested by Plato had been investigated by Locke, raised to clinical status by
Rousseau, refined into materialist method by Helvetius and Herbart, justified philosophically as
the essential religion by Comte, and scientized by Wundt. One does not educate machines, one
adjusts them.
The peculiar undertaking of educational psychology was begun by Edward Thorndike of Teachers
College in 1903. Thorndike, whose once famous puzzle box became the Skinner box of later
behavioral psychology after minor modifications, was the protégé of Wundtians Judd and
Armstrong at Wesleyan, taking his Ph.D. under Wundtian Cattell before being offered a post by
Wundtian Russell at Teachers College.
According to Thorndike, the aim of a teacher is to "produce and prevent certain responses," and
the purpose of education is to promote "adjustment." In Elementary Principles of Education
(1929), he urged the deconstruction of emphasis on "intellectual resources" for the young, advice
that was largely taken. It was bad advice in light of modern brain research suggesting direct ties
between the size and complexity of the brain and strenuous thought grappled with early on.
Thorndike said intelligence was virtually set at birth—real change was impossible—a scientific
pronouncement which helped to justify putting the brakes on ambitious curricula. But in the
vitally important behavioral area—in beliefs, attitudes, and loyalties—Thorndike did not
disappoint the empty-child crowd. In those areas so important to corporate and government
health, children were to be as malleable as anyone could want them. An early ranking of school
kids by intelligence would allow them to be separated into tracks for behavioral processing.
Thorndike soon became a driving force in the growth of national testing, a new institution which
would have consigned Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to reform school and Edison to
Special Education. Even before we got the actual test, Thorndike became a significant political
ally of the semicovert sterilization campaign taking place in America.
That pioneering eugenic program seemed socially beneficial to those casually aware of it, and it
was enthusiastically championed by some genuine American legends like Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr. But if you find yourself nodding in agreement that morons have no business with babies, you
might want to consider that according to Thorndike’s fellow psychologist H.H. Goddard at
Princeton, 83 percent of all Jews and 79 percent of all Italians were in the mental defective class.
The real difficulty with scientific psychology or other scientific social science is that it seems to be
able to produce proof of anything on command, convincing proof, too, delivered by sincere men
and women just trying to get along by going along.
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