ABSTRACT
The psychologist B. F. Skinner recounts how he became interested in applying psychological principles to the practice of education. The account of a deliberate programme of conditioning and de-conditioning in the example of Peter and the rabbit is, of course, very clearly the type of undertaking which Skinner would take as fundamental. But the example of more conventional methods of associating educational mal-performance with physical pain which was illustrated in the incident from Tom Brown's Schooldays may well show a pre-scientific and unformalised conditioning technique which is, after all, as old as education. Conditioning theory, then, assumes the alteration of behaviour to be the aim of the teaching process, and Skinner suggests that operant conditioning shapes behaviour rather in the way that a sculptor shapes a lump of clay. There is another criticism to be made which helps to explain some of the dissatisfaction caused by this emphasis on teacher-objectives rather than learner-aspiration.
