Thorndike’s Puzzle Boxes

 
Last week’s readings in the course I'm taking on learning theories were articles on Edward Thorndike who is best known for his experiments on animal intelligence. He created “puzzle boxes” in which a small animal would be placed and required to push a bar or pull a lever to escape the box and reach its food. Thorndike measured the time it took the animals to complete such tasks and generated “learning curves” which he used to illustrate rates of learning. These experiments were a benchmark in the development of behaviorism as a theory of learning, but in a Deweyan view of education such an approach will not offer an adequate picture of learning that serves our purposes for education within a democratic community.

In Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey distinguished between training and education with respect to the degree to which we can think of the learner and teacher as partnered with one another in working toward shared goals and having a shared interpretation of the social setting. For example, Dewey noted that we can train horses by controlling the stimuli inducing habitual or instinctual behavior to impose new habits more conducive to our ends, but he contrasted this process of training with education by noting that,

“the horse does not really share in the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to the horse to perform the act—he gets food, etc. But the horse, presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.”

Dewey’s distinction applies to Thorndike’s work in the consideration that the kitten’s aim in Thorndike’s puzzle-box experiments was never to solve a puzzle. It was to get to the food. The Deweyan critique on such behavior oriented approaches does not center on the cat’s motivation (though motivation is certainly relevant). He is not holding out “learning for its own sake” as an ideal and accusing the cat of having insufficiently elevated motive. In an educational situation different learners may have a variety of motivations for participating. The problem for viewing the puzzle-box scenario as education is that the cat never interpreted the situation as puzzle-solving at all. The cat has been trained to solve puzzles but has not been educated to be a “puzzle solver.” Instead, it was manipulated to circumvent obstacles to food.

Thorndike provided evidence that learning took place, but the kitten ought not be thought of as achieving the educational goal of improving its performance in solving a puzzle. That would be absurd since the kitten, presumably, has no idea what a puzzle is. Since the situation had a very different meaning for the experimenters than it did for the kitten, the experiments were a matter of control rather than guidance. They were concerned with training rather than education.

In education and in contrast to training, the desired end is not just physical but also social. Education involves the development of a shared understanding of meaning within the particular educational context. An educative outcome is not reducible to a particular physical outcome since education also includes being part of a community of shared beliefs, intentions, ideas, attitudes, and desires. It involves what Dewey called, “the mental and emotional dispositions of behavior,” as well as the behavior itself. “Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways of acting is the first step,” Dewey wrote, “Making the individual a sharer or partner in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success, its failure as his failure, is the completing step.”