Review Lecture - The technology of teaching

Abstract

More than 60 years ago, in his Talks to teachers on psychology, William James (1899) said: ‘You make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programs and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.’ In the years which followed, educational psychology and the experimental psychology of learning did little to prove him wrong. As late as 1962, an American critic, Jacques Barzun (1962), asserted that James’s book still contained ‘nearly all that anyone need know of educational method’. Speaking for the psychology of his time James was probably right, but Barzun was clearly wrong. A special branch of psychology, the so-called experimental analysis of behaviour, has produced if not an art at least a technology of teaching from which one can indeed ‘deduce programs and schemes and methods of instruction’. The public is aware of this technology through two of its products, teaching machines and programmed instruction. Their rise has been meteoric. Within a single decade hundreds of instructional programmes have been published, many different kinds of teaching machines have been offered for sale, and societies for programmed instruction have been founded in a dozen countries. Unfortunately, much of the technology has lost contact with its basic science.