ABSTRACT
American education started as a two-track system, with private schools for the elite and a factory model of public schooling designed to provide workers for a mass-production economy. Both broke (manufacturing or learning) tasks into small steps that were sequenced for incremental assembly. For decades, these processes were thought to optimize labor or learning productivity, respectively. Behaviorism measured student progress by acquisition of often minute knowledge bits. Schools rewarded successful acquisition of isolated facts and resorted to student-tracking if differences in performance suggested different ability levels in learners. Frequent assessment and testing became the hallmark of behavioristic schooling, with multiple-choice testing being the quintessential tool for probing into contextfree learning that made little reference to meaningful application.
