Re: Darwin, Evolution, the Animal Kingdom, and Man

From: Greg Alexander (galexand_at_ozemail.com.au)
Date: 12/07/04

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    Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:30:17 +1100

    David, thanks for your post.
    The amount of questions it has raised in my mind is beyond what I can really
    explore online right now, I think I'll do some more reading. I'm not sure
    where to start, and my background in this area is simply not enough. (I'm a
    government certified trainer too :), with further training in the use of NLP
    in training.)

    I guess one question is what is EAB? I've seen it mentioned several times
    without a good overview (I assume it means "Experimental Analysis of
    Behaviour?) - and you actually say you're not sure if the basic principles
    are understood. Can you point me to any good overview of the field that I
    could read?, or something addressing the better methods of teaching you say
    were explored?

    Thanks again for your post.
    Greg

    "David Longley" <David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
    > Skinner was aghast at the state of US education. He fought to bring the
    > technology of teaching to bear on education practice (and the training
    > of teachers) just as one might expect any good empirical scientist with
    > a proven track record. He spent a good part of the latter part of his
    > professional life trying to get "educators" to adopt what comes down to
    > self-paced programmed learning, but wasn't given the support he needed
    > by folk like Connant. Half a century later we still see teachers
    > struggling to do a combination of crowd control and mixed ability
    > teaching four or five times a day, with such large classes that for most
    > it's well nigh impossible (which isn't helped by an estimated 1:20 being
    > ADHD). It often seems to come down to varying degrees of expertise in
    > the ability to herd cats. Is this the consequence of "political
    > correctness" or is it just human idiocy? People like Connant played a
    > significant role in engineering these problems in the first place. Is it
    > conspiracy or is it ***-up? Perhaps it depends on one's politics?
    >
    > Despite the UK government's education policy publicly asserting that it
    > discourages intake selection (suspected infringement can lead to court
    > action), it happens nonetheless through natural (and socially
    > engineered) diversity in "cognitive ability" and social mobility. As a
    > consequence, and in conjunction with other policies designed to keep
    > delinquents out of custody (and in the community in the belief that most
    > boys grow out of it) our inner city schools (in particular) are
    > progressively finding themselves having to cope with more and more
    > (serious) delinquency. As a consequence, "behaviour management" is
    > becoming more and more important in our schools. We now have a new kind
    > of "care in the community". The figures bearing on this are quite
    > remarkable, and yet most folk aren't aware of them. To give a financial
    > perspective on this, a rough estimate at the combined cost of crime and
    > education in the UK is in the order of 120 billion pounds per annum.
    >
    > Fourteen years ago, we began trying to redress some of this via a
    > positive system of behaviour management based on attainment which
    > explicitly drew on the EAB/AAB, and which was implemented under
    > naturally controlled conditions. Whilst the words from the above system
    > are now in wider circulation, I'm sure the practice is not. We have IT
    > everywhere, but we still don't have effective programmed
    > learning/behaviour management - at what cost?
    >
    > In fact, I'm still not sure to what extent the basic principles were
    > ever really understood. People seem to have a peculiar scotoma where it
    > comes to grasping the nature of behaviour analysis [#1] - something
    > Skinner frequently remarked upon and which we have seen all too often in
    > c.a.p. In my own applied field, we gave new credence to the notion of
    > "programmes" but the initiative was soon blighted by the introduction of
    > "cognitive skills" courses (imported from Canada of all places!). The
    > rationale for this flew in the face of all the empirical evidence that I
    > was aware of at the time of their introduction, which is why I
    > vehemently argued against their introduction. Over a decade later, they
    > fly in the face of our government's independent research as well (which
    > basically just replicates the earlier contrary evidence).
    >
    > The price of "political correctness" is more than the reinforcement of
    > idiocy. I get much the same feeling about all of this that I do about
    > much that I see in c.a.p in response to expositions of what behaviour
    > analysis comes down to. It's so absurd that one has to ask if there's
    > more to all this than meets the eye?
    >
    > If so, the question remains, at what expense? At whose expense?
    >
    > #1 I'm sure the books by folk such as Huxley and Orwell didn't help
    > matters - but people are more readily influenced by science fiction than
    > they are by science. This is a serious problem and one which is, sadly,
    > widely exploited to most peoples' detriment.

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