In a modern kitchen, all the cook must do is read the recipe, mix the ingredients, set the stove, and give the pot an occasional stir. To psychologist B.F. Skinner, the classroom is like a modern kitchen and "there is no reason why the school room should be any less mechanized than ... the kitchen." The teacher should remain, but only as cook.

But unlike many educators, Skinner has not stopped at theory. He has taken the first step in mechanizing the classroom by building a teaching machine. Ten years in the laboratory with pigeons, rats and other lower organisms, studying the learning process, convinced him that the basic conditions of the process can be fulfilled by machines. In fact, he says, his machine with its levers, disks and automatic marker teaches certain things more intelligibly than most teachers.

What did Skinner learn from his pigeons and rats that he incorporated in his machine? He discovered that "students" learn best when they know immediately whether or not they are right--and that they do better when they are right all or most of the time. Being allowed to work at their own rate (which Skinner considers to be at least twice as fast on his machine as in the classroom) and to make progress by small steps also aid them. The machine satisfies all these criteria. The last of them, however, presents the real problem for Skinner and his researchers.

His task for the next year with his grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education will be to determine just what material is necessary and suitable for an elementary college-level course in a language and a science. For a language, Skinner will need the help of experts to scale and translate the material. His experimental "animals" will be graduate students who need to learn a language for their Ph.D. examinations. Besides developing and perfecting the materia, Skinner will have to build enough machines for an actual classroom trial when the grant runs out a year from July 1.

Modern Education's Failure

The exact fate of his machines is unknown. He hopes to find a college somewhere, possibly Harvard, which would consent to conduct a test run.

The motivation for Skinner's work in the field seems to come from what he considers to be a great failure in modern education. He spelled out his anxieties in an article for the Harvard Educational Review in Spring, 1954, called the "Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching."

First, he believes, the forces which determine the students' attitudes towards their work are at fault. Fear boredom and other anxieties keep the students' minds away from the business of learning. Half a century ago, he writes, "for the immediate purposes of education the child acted to avoid or escape punishment. It was part of the reform movement known as progressive education to make the positive consequences more immediately effective, but anyone who visits the lower grades of the average school today will observe that a change has been made, not from averse to positive control, but from one form of averse stimulation to another.... In this welter of averse consequences, getting the right answer is in itself an insignificant event, any effect of which is lost amid the anxieties, the boredom, and the aggressions which are the inevitable by-products of averse control."

Second, the teachers, even under the best conditions, fail to give the student an immediate knowledge of his accomplishment. "It can easily be demonstrated," Skiner explained in psychychological jargon, "that, unless explicit mediating behavior has been set up, the lapse of only a few seconds between response and reinforcement destroys most of the effect."

In the case of arithmetic, Skinner complained that "modern children simply do not learn arithmetic quickly or well.... The glimpse of a column of figures, not to say an algebraic symbol or an integral sign, is likely to set off--not mathematical behavior--but a reaction of enixiety, guilt, or fear.

"The teacher is no happier about this than the pupil. Denied the opportunity to control via the birch rod, quite at sea as to the mode of operation of the few techniques at her disposal, she spends as little time as possible on drill subjects and eagerly subscribes to philosophies of education which emphasize material of greater inherant interest."

But the requirements for proper education "are probably incompatible with the current realities of the classroom." As a remedy, he suggests "we have every reason to expect, therefore, that the most effective control of human learning will require instrumental aid. The simple fact is that, as a mere reinforcing mechanism, the teacher is out of date."

These criticisms of the teaching method apply, of course, in a general way, to college teaching, especially of language at the elementary level.

Skinner answers the standard objections to mechanized education. First, far from treating the child "as a mere animal," the machines would be resigned to relieve the teacher of routine, but necessary, drill. The teacher would not be replaced, but "may begin to function, not in lieu of a cheap machine, but through intellectual, cultural, and emotional contacts of that distinctive sort which testifiy to his status as a human being."

As for the practicality of mechanizing schools, he says that the machines--even a large number of them--would not strain our economy. "A country which annually produces millions of refrigerators, dish-washers, automatic washing-machines, automatic clothes-dryers, and automatic garbage disposers can certainly afford the equipment necessary to educate its citizens to high standards of competence in the most effective way."