Intelligence by Design: Thorndike versus Dewey

Abstract

As the battle for influence over school reform continues in the 21st century, Mr. Gibboney finds that Edward Thorndike maintains the upper hand over John Dewey. One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost. --Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (1) IN THAT brief statement, historian Ellen Lagemann provides a useful scaffolding for understanding the problems education faces today, nearly a century after Dewey published Democracy and Education (1916). In the juxtaposition of these two figures, we can see one of the primary reasons that 80% of education reforms proposed and implemented over the past half century have yielded such poor results. The mechanistic view of learning espoused by Thorndike dominated the last half of the 20th century in so-called school reform. With the signing of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002, Thorndike's ghost marched at the head of the reform parade while the chief marshal, President George W. Bush, flanked by legislators of both parties, waved approvingly from the reviewing stand. In what did Thorndike, who died in 1949, believe? In short, he believed in the possibility of a science of education so powerful that experts alone would be able to decide what to teach, how to teach it, and how to evaluate it. In The Transformation of the School, Lawrence Cremin describes Thorndike's faith in numbers as unbounded. Indeed, he believed that such value-laden matters as setting the aims of education could be done efficiently by experts, using the kind of science he was developing. Thorndike's little band of experts (mostly psychologists) included no informed teachers. Thorndike's research also led him to believe in the specific nature of the transfer of learning. This meant that learning to think in one subject, such as physics, did no more to increase general intelligence than learning in any other subject. According to this view, subjects such as bookkeeping or Latin appeared to be equal in their effect on intelligence. (2) This view led many educators to question the value of academic subjects, a position about which Thorndike himself had some doubts. Dewey's ideas on the transfer of learning were fundamentally more humanistic than Thorndike's. Dewey believed subject matter in schools exists to make the quality of democratic life as good as it can be under given conditions. He asserted that a teacher ought to try to arouse a continuing interest in learning throughout a student's life. Dewey argued that people within the broad span of normal human abilities had a vast capacity for learning and that a critical intelligence was essential for democratic life. In Democracy and Education, he stated, Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. [One can judge the value of a good school to] the extent in which it creates a desire for continued [learning] and supplies means for making the desire effective in [practice]. (3) Notice that, where Thorndike takes a cramped, narrow path between subjects and confounds transfer of learning with intelligence measured by tests, Dewey takes an expansive, generous view of transfer. He includes all normal citizens within his view and argues that the goal of schools ought to be developing an attitude--the love of learning. And ultimately schools should be judged on how well they meet this difficult goal. In other words, what is transferred when a student learns something that is truly important is intangible and immeasurable by tests. It is an attitude, the desire to learn. Subject matter is but one among many means used to attain this central objective, which is sadly overlooked in today's race for higher test scores. To put the distinction sharply, Thorndike saw humans in the image of the machine; Dewey saw them in the image of life. …