1. Pavlov's drooling dog

Photo by Charles Deluvio on unsplash

It wasn't so much the dogs. It was the bells. Those incessant ringing bells. Just like Quasimodo, Ivan Pavlov was probably maddened by the bells.

Pavlov was interested in drooling. Not his own drooling, but the dogs. He was merrily going about his experiments on canine digestion. And then the bells started ringing.

But the bells served a purpose, because although they did Pavlov's head in, they also rang a bell in his head, so to speak. He had no control over the bells. He thought he could control the dogs, but discovered that they were controlled by the bells.

You see, whenever a bell rang, the dogs associated the ringing of the bell with what had happened the last time the bells rang. Like being fed. So every time the bell rang, the dogs drooled. Whether the food was there or not.

Pavlov realised that the dogs associated the ringing of the bells with being fed. Others who heard about this breakthrough made the mistake of thinking that perhaps human behaviour could also be explained by this principle of association. They included J. B. Watson, B. F. Skinner and other psychologists who enjoyed using two initials. This was not clever. Human behaviour turned out to be a lot more complex than dog behaviour. Well, usually.

A lot of questions remain unanswered. What would have happened if instead of being fed, the dogs had been played Beethoven's third symphony? This would have given a whole new meaning to the term classical conditioning of course, but that's beside the point. The dogs would associate the bell with classical music instead of food. They wouldn't salivate, but their tails would probably wag rhythmically. So the psychologists would still have made the same mistake.

And what if, instead of bells, a gun shot had gone off as the food was presented? Would the dogs drool every time they heard a gun shot? Would the carpet be ruined during a showing of Gunfight At The OK Coral? Or would they be afraid of food, and die of starvation?

And lo and behold, some bright spark (probably a psychologist with two initials in place of a first name) thought it would be a great idea to apply these principles in schools. Were they expecting children to respond like Pavlov's drooling dogs? Well, it's applied at a very simple behavioural level. Every time the bell rings, children pack up their things, and move to the next lesson. Expose them to enough of the same and they are conditioned to do this. Every time the lunch bell rings, every child must be hungry. They are managed by the bell .... or sanctions .... or grades. Everything is compartmentalised, sequenced, homogenised and tested to destruction. Punishment and reward. Stay in line. Speak when spoken to. Never question authority. Know your place.

Such conditioning devices shouldn't take precedence over freedom to learn. But they do, and school ends up as a cultural conditioning tool. And we wonder why education is going to the dogs.

Ring a bell with anyone?

Next time: 2. Chekhov's smoking gun


Pavlov's drooling dog by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's