Medieval Practices

Imagine you decided to teach a pigeon parables from The Bible.

I don’t want to dwell too long on your reasons for doing so. Probably some peculiar religious belief:  'scripture edifies the animal soul' or something along those lines...

How would you do it? (I am sure you could do it by the way).

You might well want to lock it in a box. Control what it sees. Perhaps you would apply scientific methods.

Imagine discovering that electric shocks accelerated the learning process: by shocking the pigeons, you can get them to memorise more, faster.

This is all quite plausible. So now I have some questions for you:

• Do you now believe that electrical shocks are an essential part of the pigeon’s learning process?
• Have you discovered anything interesting about pigeon learning?
• Do you conclude that electric shocks are the most successful learning strategy the pigeon can employ?
• What is the relationship between the unnatural procedure you have enforced (education) and the pigeon’s natural learning mechanisms?
• What do you think about the ethics of this procedure?

This is what we do with our children. We put them in a controlled environment and give them an unnatural task to do. We discover that fear and punishment are effective, and we call our procedure ‘education’. It is all very scientific, but it is unclear if we have learned anything about learning. It seems more likely we are doing something horrible.