Pavlov’s Dogs and The Importance Of Environment In Learning
Johann Friedrich Herbart, called for the application of psychology to the art of teaching in the late 1870s. But serious efforts were only beginning to be made after Willem Wundt differentiated psychology as a science from philosophy and biology. A whole new world of exploration opened up after he founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research, marking the beginning of modern psychology.
In the late 1890s, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian Psychologist had identified a fundamental associative learning process in called classical conditioning which marked the beginning of behaviourism. It refers to the learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus begins to be associated with a stimulus that produces a certain behaviour. Pavlov came across this phenomenon accidentally while studying digestion in dogs. He saw that the dogs started salivating while looking at the helpers who generally brought their food. He then went on to experiment with food and various other stimuli of smell and sounds to study this phenomenon. The dogs had made a connection between the sound of a bell and receiving food, so a new behaviour had been conditioned. In 1920s, John Watson built upon this idea and started experimenting with humans to see if classical conditioning works on us as well.
The basics of Pavlov’s classical conditioning became the basis of the current learning theories, emphasising on the environment that facilitates learning. After classical conditioning, a follower of Pavlov developed Operant Conditioning which involves positive and negative reinforcements. Positive and negative reinforcement started being used inside classrooms and outside as well to design student’s behaviour. To encourage good behaviour, students are often rewards and to decrease maladaptive behaviour, students are punished. Punishments are used to weaken a particular behaviour whereas rewards are used to strengthen or reinforce a particular behaviour. A teacher can structure their teaching in order to receive the correct response or even use punishment to ensure the incorrect response is not given. Teachers have to strive to create a positive experience for students in school. This phenomenon explains why some students start looking at school negatively or some subjects negatively because of the kind of repeated experiences they are subject to. For example, if a child is humiliated by a professor, they might develop school phobia. Another example here is the anxiety and stress that students go through during exams, these often become permanent hindering the student’s performance.
During the Progressive Era, around the same time, John Dewey- founder of Pragmatism, was also talking about how children learn best when they interacted with their environments (what came to be known as experiential learning) and were actively involved with designing the school curriculum. Even though he rejected much of the behaviourism theory, calling it too simplistic and inadequate in explaining complex learning processes. He believed that the child should take an active part in their own learning where the teacher would just play the role of a guide or facilitator rather than being a passive recipient, emphasising on the social context of learning. During the same time, chalkboards started being used in classrooms which helped offered more pedagogical efficiency, helping students get more focused.
In India, Rabindranath Tagore questioned the school system regarding them as mills of rote learning with no freedom for creativity. He wrote in the pamphlet ‘The Centre of Indian Culture’- ‘In education, the most inspiring atmosphere of creative activity is important. The primary function of the institution must be constructive; scope must be for all kinds of intellectual exploration. Teaching must be one with culture, spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, economic and social. True education is to realize at every step how our training and knowledge have an organic connection with our surroundings”.
The decade of 1890 saw an advancement in psychology and its application in education. Thinkers were talking about the unconscious mind and how it affects learning and the important role the environment plays in the development of a child. These were very radical ideas at the time but are the basis of our current education pedagogy.
