Unhand Me, Sir! Your Objectives are Naught but Behavioral!
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The Victorian damsel who is distressed in the title of this article wouldn't get to first base with her demurral today. "What's wrong with a little action?", she'd he asked. "Wbaddya want, commitment? You some kinda forever freak orsomethin'?" If any simplistic phrase were able t o capture the essence of today's hip culture, it would sum u p precisely what was bothering our Victorian young lady: behavior without commitment. Action without interaction. Motion without emotion. Behavior is the culmination of human design. The act's the thing. Looking around us in the nineteen-seventies, we find the behaviorist ethic to pervade a great many more aspects of our society than seduction. One of these, surprisingly, turns out to be the field of education, where the advent of behaviorism bas recently been forcing people to ask themselves some very blunt questions: Is the primary object of education the production of certain types of behavior? Can we say that a person has heen educated when he is able to reproduce a certain practiced behavior pattern u w n receint of the Droner stimulus? Is human education-not q u a i i t a t i v e ~hifferent ~ from the stimulus-response kind of learnine accomnlished bv" exnerimental . animals in psychology iaboratoiies? Can we consider a college student, for example, to have been educated in a certain subject as soon as he can successfully negotiate a maze of preconceived exercises? As basic as they are, it would seem that these questions must have been answered long ago to the satisfaction of nearly everyone. But we are living in an age which is characterized least of all by unanimity-an age in which all of the old answers are being exhumed and ruthlessly reexamined. And as is obvious to any observer of the ferment on our cammses. education is receivine" its full measure of ruthless reexamination. We are not surprised, therefore, that the very purposes of education, particularly of higher education, are being questioned and redefined almost daily, to the consternation of those who thoueht they already knew and to the delight of those who reGsh novelty for its own sake. As a result we find ourselves asking yet again, "Does the process of education consist primarily of the instillment of behavior pattems?" If the word "education" is being misused as in the socalled driver education activities of our high schools, it would certainly seem that the objective is to instill the behavior pattern known as operating a motor vehicle safely. But once the student is ahle to operate the vehicle efficiently and safely, has he been educated or has he merely been trained? The answer in this case is obvious. As with the experimental animal trained to run a maze in a psychology laboratory, learning has certainly taken place, and perhaps even instruction, but not education. If all such cases of misguided nomenclature were as easily disposed of, life would be simple indeed. But there is a more subtle and disturbing tendency in the academic world today to accept the dexterous performance of overt acts as evidence of erudition. I t is only in academia, where pomposity is an occupational disease, that anyone would presume to paste the more impressive label "education"
over what is in reality training. Do the professional baseball teams insist that their tropical retreats are "Spring Education Camps"? Do their hitters spend time a t "Batter Education"? No, what is taking place is training and practice, and nobody tries to call it anything more grandiose. The players are simply developing skills (behavior patterns) which will hopefully lead to large numbers of runs crossing the plate during the season-a goal as clearly defined as any can be. In our eagerness to define clear goals in a game which is infinitely more complex than baseball, we educators are sometimes enticed into choosing misconceived objectives in order to provide ourselves with shining opportunities of devising dynamic and ingenious methods of reaching them. One such methodology currently enjoying a wave of popularity is the specification of behavioral objectives: specified operations or acts which the student is expected to he able to perform as evidence of the successful completion of a course of s t u d y s k i l l s a t which the course is attempting t o make the student adept. At the end of a chemistry or physics course, for example, he should be able to solve certain typical kinds of numerical problems; at the end of a petrology course he should be able to identify a dozen specified types of rock; a t the end of a history course he should be ahle to trace the chronoloPical landmarks of a political or social movement, and so on. If we look a t a list of the behavioral obiectives set forth for any given course of study, we notice that they are all expressed by the use of active verbs: the student should be ahle to solve, to compute, to write, to define, to select, to list, to match, to express, to describe, and so on. (I have seen the term "conceptual behavior" used by an educational psychologist in an attempt to make such objectives seem less overtly mechanical, but I don't know what i t means.) Verbs such as understand, evaluate, criticize, appreciate, interpret, judge, conceive, or realize do not appear because they are considered to be too vague for precise measurement and hence invalid educational objectives. But more will be said below about the worship of precise measurement. The way the game is played in Freshman Chemistry h lo Mode is something like this: The student is handed a list of explicit behavioral objectives on the first day of the term and is told that when be can perform all or most of them he will have mastered the course. The list is offered in a professed spirit of fairness and openness, so that each student may know precisely what he must do t o get an A. It constitutes a strongly implied if not actually expressed promise that nothing tricky or sneaky (presumably meaning a type of question which might require originality or extrapolation or the synthesis of ideas) will ever appear on an examination in that course. Just one from Column A and a few from Column B; they're all right there on the menu from the beginning. Along with the list of behavioral objectives handed to the students frequently comes the instructor's creed, in which among other things he states that he couldn't care less about whether the students come to class (if indeed there are any formal classes a t all) as long as they can
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Volume 50, Number 2, February 1973
/ 99
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