Teaching With Technology Journal: Week 3

This week we explored behaviorist theory and its impact on the evolution of educational technology. It was interesting to see how the ideas governing primitive “teaching machines” are nearly identical to those steering present day software.

Although I don’t view behaviorism as an all-encompassing model for educational practices, I do see that it has a place in constructing the pyramid of learning as outlined by Benjamin Bloom. Behaviorist theory can most readily aid in building the base of the pyramid, helping to remember, understand, and in some ways guiding the application of knowledge.

Overall, I view behaviorist conditioning as effective, helpful, and yet, demeaning to the potential growth of a human being; if viewed as the primary operator of human action. Perhaps there is some truth that we are made out of a tapestry interwoven by conditioned responses, but it’s not the whole picture.

To view behaviorism at such face value is to sign away all remnants of free will. If behaviorism alone dictates the operation of our existence then all semblance of choice falls to illusion. All action is a guided by a series of conditioning from which we are inextricably trapped. In such a world, we are merely bags of chemical mechanization. Truth, but is it the whole truth? If so, this is not a world in which I would like to live.

I have hope that the true mark of a human being is the ability to rise above these chemical constraints. There is a beautiful truth lying beyond the garden wall, ringing into an eternal creation of poetry, art, music and literature, that is inexplicable to the behaviorist.