B.F. Skinner’s Teaching Machine should make us afraid. Very afraid.

The famous video from 1954 of B.F. Skinner explaining how the Teaching Machine works is often shown to illustrate how behaviourist theory can inform educational practices. The camera pans across rows of youngsters applying themselves to the task at hand. They’re using the Teaching Machines to read a question or problem that has a gap in it; they supply the missing piece of information by writing in an answer, and moving a lever lets them compare their answer with the correct one.

The film’s poor quality and high 1950s production design leaves you feeling like you’re watching something not just from another era, but another planet. A modern educator’s initial reaction is to pat oneself on the back and say “good job I don’t teach like that.”

But don’t we teach like that? A very witty video takes Skinner’s narration and overlays it onto BBC footage of a school in Bolton showing students learning with tablets, using apps to perform exercises like filling in the blanks or dragging-and-dropping answers into slots. We’ve come a long way in 60+ years, and yet we haven’t.

Skinner makes the argument that the machines enable self-paced learning. Its virtue lies in its ability to allow all learners achieve competence in the task at hand, an option not available to a lot of learners in a group learning situation: slow learners get left behind, and fast learners get bored.

That proposition has merit; individualized attention makes pedagogical sense. The issue here is that group learning - classes of students - is the standard form of teaching because it makes the most economic sense. One-on-one tutoring is not an expense our societies are willing to bear or even have the capacity to implement. Hence the rise of the teaching machines.

Beyond the dystopic futuristic scenario contained in the Skinner prequel to Skynet, the film is bothersome for a more fundamental reason. In his narration Skinner confirms his behaviourist thinking by contending that the machines have two positive effects on student learning: the immediate feedback “leads most rapidly to the formation of correct behaviour,” and since students are freed from uncertainty or anxiety about their answers, their work becomes pleasurable - they don’t have to force themselves to study.

Theoretically, maybe. But in the real world of human individuals, this idea that mechanistic learning will work like, well, a machine seems out of touch with realities of life. People aren’t machines and won’t perform like ones. And when you watch the film you have to ask yourself: would these youngster find it “pleasurable” to do this all day long?

Skinner’s notion that reward will encourage certain learning behaviour is well grounded by all those studies of mice in mazes. But in higher education we have to reach higher. One way we do that is by realizing that “correct behaviour” probably shouldn’t be our goal. True understanding and knowledge won’t come with rewards like immediate feedback or arbitrary grades, but by helping learners deepen their understanding of what they’re learning.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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