00:00:00.000 - 00:00:38.500

[ Silence ] [ Inaudible ] And that's a challenge, you see. And when you work with that kind of a retarded person

00:00:38.500 - 00:00:52.500

with superimposed sensory handicap, and possibly emotional handicap, you've got to really sit down and think. You've got to think harder than that gal

00:00:52.500 - 00:01:11.300

that worked with Helen Keller, you know? Because Helen Keller had something [ Inaudible ] Did I give you the questions that a good learning theory should ask?

00:01:11.300 - 00:01:36.500

One of them is what is the role of practice in learning? [inaudible] What's the role of practice? [inaudible]

00:01:36.500 - 00:02:31.500

What are the limits of learning? [inaudible] I agree how important are reward and punishment, and pride and incentive. Questioner 2 (JP) What is the place of insight and understanding in life?

00:02:31.500 - 00:03:03.840

[ Inaudible ] Third or fifth, excuse me, I'm going to call it fifth, would be does learning one thing help you in understanding others? [Sounds of a classroom]

00:03:03.840 - 00:03:44.840

That's the old problem of transfer of training. For example, I just started this little study the other day, I must remind you. Would a guy who's a good whistler and is six years of age, say you get a group of six-year-olds who are good whistlers, if you studied them longitudinally, how many of them would become musicians? Isn't that an interesting, fascinating question?

00:03:44.840 - 00:04:00.840

Not very. But you see, in transfer of training, if you have had training in music, for example, and know something about beat, beat,

00:04:00.840 - 00:04:17.840

and all that sort of good thing, it's somewhat easier to learn international morph code. So, if you're a musician and don't know Mark Coates, why don't you give it a whirl?

00:04:17.840 - 00:04:27.840

It'd be fascinating. You see, if you get locked up in a restroom someplace and somebody throws away the key, you could tap internet from Mark Coates.

00:04:27.840 - 00:04:37.320

Save our souls, you know? You know how that goes, you can internet from Mark Coates. [INAUDIBLE]

00:04:37.320 - 00:04:59.720

So six, what happens when we remember and when we forget? These are questions posed by Bill Gardner Bauer. And these are issues that a comprehensive theory of learning ought to address.

00:04:59.720 - 00:05:40.180

[INAUDIBLE] Hillgard and Bauer. [ Inaudible ] [inaudible]

00:05:40.180 - 00:05:58.180

People sit around with expectations building up all the time. And that's what the whole of cognitive dissonance is built on, is expectations. Well...

00:05:58.180 - 00:06:14.180

I want to continue a little bit. I talked the other day a little bit about knowledge of results, and its importance in learning. And I've got a little bit more to bring in on about knowledge of results.

00:06:14.180 - 00:06:46.260

It's extremely important in skills learning. And skill learning is such stuff that involves motor processes and muscular activities, playing tennis, swimming, rifle shooting, tagging, and so on.

00:06:46.260 - 00:07:05.200

It's a different kind of learning from word or concept learning. [ Silence ] Knowledge of results is one of the most important influences in this type of wonder.

00:07:05.200 - 00:07:25.600

And one guy who did a massive review of all the literature on knowledge of results, a guy named Billet Rue, if you don't mean to remember. He says this after concluding his lecture. The strongest and most important variable

00:07:25.600 - 00:07:39.400

controlling performance and learning is the knowledge of the result. There is no improvement without knowledge of the result and progressive improvement with it.

00:07:39.400 - 00:08:00.760

And if you withdraw it, learning deteriorates. And a simple example of knowledge of results is that individuals who take exams and are provided with relatively immediate knowledge of results

00:08:00.760 - 00:08:14.120

in contrast to those who do not have this knowledge do better in later tests. I'll get your exams back to you first. Now, if you use knowledge of results

00:08:14.120 - 00:08:29.620

of the reinforcement, then you can see a variety of forms that it takes. For example, knowledge of results has been used in industry for years in such vehicles

00:08:29.620 - 00:09:09.620

as promotion and the scheduling of pay. That's his knowledge of results. Knowledge of results gives both information and reward to the learner. So if you've got some guy with an IQ of 90, and you've got another guy in your plant, or another group of guys with a 130 average,

00:09:09.620 - 00:09:38.620

The frequency of pay should be greater here. In other words, a group of workers whose average IQ is, say, 90, you may want to say that I'm on a weekly basis or every other week Because delay of reward is something that goes along with intelligence.

00:09:38.620 - 00:10:06.620

People of lower intelligence need more immediate reinforcement. So that the target, in the end, needs to give them, you know, and demand every day. Promotion. Industry uses that as a form of knowledge of results. Because it gives you information on the quality of your work and it's a reinforcer.

00:10:06.620 - 00:10:24.640

If you need to promote a class of trainable MRs, promote them every week. How could you do that? Good But you could have some little stage or

00:10:24.640 - 00:10:57.480

Some knowledge that in some particular area they Skill Better Rimore

00:10:57.480 - 00:11:23.480

They enjoy getting a token, and they learn to use a slot machine. And they'll work like levers, you know, for that token. In other words, they can take a symbolic reinforcer and so can the educable level of Victoria. With printables, the more immediate types of reinforcement would probably be better.

00:11:23.480 - 00:11:39.840

But for either the handicapped or the normal person, knowledge of results occupies a strategic motivational component in learning. And both intrinsic and extrinsic knowledge of results

00:11:39.840 - 00:12:03.000

are important. See, in activities where almost immediate feedback is possible are provided, such as dancing, or playing a trumpet, and where you can get immediate feedback, like dancing.

00:12:03.000 - 00:12:13.120

Your partner might say, you're not dancing, boy. You're walking. That's feedback. Well, then we learn almost at once,

00:12:13.120 - 00:12:25.560

you see, with this kind of immediacy of feedback, to make corrective actions. And these kind of over activities, like dancing, are sort of intrinsic in nature.

00:12:25.560 - 00:12:44.160

But where the clarity of the task is very low, then you've got to have external or extrinsic feedback. And of course, if possible at all, you need continuous feedback when

00:12:44.160 - 00:13:07.600

working with a handicap. Now that's enough on that knowledge of results. We might talk a little bit about some other aspects of social motivation, what energizes and directs

00:13:07.600 - 00:13:21.000

the learner. And then we'll get on into observational learning, which we haven't really developed yet. But one of the aspects of social motivation

00:13:21.000 - 00:13:58.920

has to do with ego involvement. And this ego involvement refers to circumstances in which attitudes relative to the person himself and his possessions are engaged, could even be the person's values about institutions.

00:13:58.920 - 00:14:12.920

And I'm talking about any kind of an institution. In a whole, as an institution, in terms of sociology, or belonging to a certain church.

00:14:12.920 - 00:14:23.920

When you touch on these things, you're touching the individual in terms of the motivational component. And there are lots of experimental

00:14:23.920 - 00:15:13.920

kinds of operations employed in studies of equal involvement. But most of them focus on threats to the person's identity or status or prestige. And most of these studies of ego involvement devise situations where they contain the possibility of interference with or deprivation of the need to enhance or maintain one's feeling of esteem.

00:15:13.920 - 00:15:48.320

[ Inaudible ] They're getting more difficult all the time. [ Inaudible ] And those in the past have dealt primarily with setting up some kind of a stage deal

00:15:48.320 - 00:16:24.320

where the person's ego or threat to self-esteem is involved. Like, for example, you might set up instructions that you're taking a very important intelligence test. You see, that arouses and activates the ego or self-esteem. And everybody knows that the most commonly employed insult in our society and the most damning to a person's esteem is to be called stupid.

00:16:24.320 - 00:17:03.320

If you hit a person in their intellect, you hit them harder than any other place you can smack them. So if you want a good strategic insult to employ, and you happen to be nine feet tall, you get by with it. Walk down the street and tell people there don't. That's a good one. Another kind of approach to studying equal involvement is providing material which involves the subject in some way.

00:17:03.320 - 00:17:39.320

A story disparaging the subject's sex, for example. You know, put the person down and talk to the man or the woman. [ Silence ] Well, a summary of findings of studies involving ego generally show that reactions to the ego involvement vary with a lot of subject variables.

00:17:39.320 - 00:18:19.320

For example, subjects who have high need achievement or very low anxiety tend to improve performance under such threats. And the performance of high and low need achievement tends to be influenced adversely. Now, the orphan of a niece or a teen is partially learned within the family context. Certain groups have a need to achieve academic success.

00:18:19.320 - 00:18:46.320

The skin and grains are drilled in. Another social motive has to do with uncertainty, and uncertainty about one's own characteristics, mainly in communication and affiliation.

00:18:46.320 - 00:19:04.980

when data cannot be obtained from non-social sources. People need feedback about themselves, and you can set up experimentally conditions of great uncertainty.

00:19:04.980 - 00:19:38.580

And finally, and this is one dear to my playful heart, Another social kind of motivation involves dissonance. D-I-S-S-O-N-A-N-C-E. It was long about 1950 when this dissonance stuff started creeping into the psychological literature.

00:19:39.080 - 00:20:07.040

And the psychologist picked up on the idea that discrepancy is an important condition in motivation. Discrepancy, for example, in relation to the expectation, or in relation to expectations, to outcomes,

00:20:07.040 - 00:20:27.800

are one piece of knowledge to another. You walk in this room, this is a little space for discrepancy, and dissonance, and you expect the professor

00:20:27.800 - 00:20:39.880

will say something. Tomorrow you walk in, and I don't say anything. I just stand. This is a pretty good illustration

00:20:39.880 - 00:21:04.300

of cognitive dissonance. And as I now remain mute, and as you become somewhat more somewhat anxious or tense or exhibit a drive that gets me back in proper perspective and role,

00:21:04.300 - 00:21:30.300

some of you will start talking. You see, this speaks to the role of silence in education. At any rate, a professor did this to a seminar group I was in once, about the time topic of dissonance theory got some play.

00:21:30.300 - 00:21:56.300

And he was the best lecturer I'd ever had in my entire life. And if you took notes as he gave them, you had a book at the end of the semester. He was that good. He came in, sat at the big seminar table, at the head of it, where Papa Bear is always supposed to sit,

00:21:56.300 - 00:22:37.100

and he said nothing. He was a bullified lecturer and extremely well-argumented. [ Inaudible ] Just one month, 20 minutes, nothing.

00:22:37.100 - 00:22:50.980

And I thought, this is the most brilliant guy I've ever seen. He knows how to make silence a lecture. Well, after it all came to light, and variously people tried to run in and fill this vacuum,

00:22:50.980 - 00:23:16.820

and tried to get him back in his established role, and he wouldn't go. And finally, what happened after 15 or so minutes class. Certain graduate students started making noises like "I'll take over." In other words, leadership, you see, gravitates to fill a vacuum.

00:23:16.820 - 00:23:34.220

And that was the subject of this guy's lecture. He did a neat analysis of what every person tried to do and how one person, the brightest member in the class, rushed in to fill his vacancy.

00:23:34.220 - 00:23:44.860

That wasn't me. That was Ed Ziegler, who was a professor at Yale. He was straight A all the way. Everybody knew him.

00:23:44.860 - 00:24:18.860

that were then made at home in an advanced experimental social psychology class. So, you see, this kind of dissonance, whenever we have filled up expectancies about the roles that other people are to fill, mother mode, father mode, teacher, class clown. Any of these things can be a productive setting for the establishment of dissonance.

00:24:18.860 - 00:24:58.360

And disciplines can work to your advantage, you see, in teaching a handicap. What one says versus what one does are some of the major concerns of the discipline. You create a discrepancy. You see, Festinger was the author of Cognitive Dissonance Theory at the SDI&DDR.

00:24:58.360 - 00:25:34.080

And here's what he postulates. He says cognitive dissonance is or gives rise to a tension state which is motivational in character. Just as hunger is motivating, so is cognitive dissonance. The reduction of dissonance will give rise to activity that's oriented to reducing or eliminating this dissonance.

00:25:34.080 - 00:26:13.080

A successful reduction of dissonance is rewarding in the same sense that eating apple pie is rewarding. So that's an important concern in the social motivation role in life. It has been placed. A lot of this dissonance that's generated in everyday life, and it's used a lot in humor situations, you know.

00:26:15.080 - 00:26:28.560

I can make up a joke for you right now. I'm talking about cognitive dissonance, but I better not because my mind tends toward non-coeducational jokes.

00:26:28.560 - 00:26:59.840

It depends on two things. First, the importance of these informational elements. And second, the ratio of dissonance to consonant cognition. The ratio of dissonance to consonant cognition.

00:27:01.840 - 00:27:29.840

In other words, you see, if a person employs distance too much, then it tends to become an expectancy, and there is no distance. You have to use it selectively in the classroom. You can catalog by having another teacher or teachers present in your classroom,

00:27:29.840 - 00:27:45.140

classroom, for example, and let them catalog your typical or standard behaviors. Or let the students independently do it if they happen to be intelligent enough to write.

00:27:45.140 - 00:27:59.020

And then from this, you can stage your own dissonance as you variously leap from one to another role. You see, if you're a teacher all the time, That gets monotonous.

00:27:59.020 - 00:28:11.480

So periodically, you take on the characteristics of Jackie Mason and all that. You get all that dirt. A lot of this kind of stuff, you know?

00:28:11.480 - 00:28:23.480

You animate. That's business. For example, you're a classical traditional teacher who just talks very straightforwardly

00:28:23.480 - 00:28:46.480

[inaudible] Another way of establishing dissonance in a class, suppose you talk rather loudly all the time, because you happen to be a teacher of, say, the educable, mentally retarded,

00:28:46.480 - 00:29:07.480

and you may realize that there are some hearing losses present, perhaps more than you would expect in a normally intelligent person. So you talk loudly most of the time. And then one day you talk softly.

00:29:07.480 - 00:29:29.960

And people have to lean forward a little on the edge of their seats to hear you. You know? [INAUDIBLE] Had a friend once.

00:29:29.960 - 00:29:53.440

He was always controlling the conversation. [INAUDIBLE] [inaudible] And you always had to say, "Excuse me, what did you say?"

00:29:53.440 - 00:30:02.440

I didn't catch that. So he got to redeem himself. He liked to talk. He liked to establish his own ideas.

00:30:02.440 - 00:30:30.440

And finally, this was an example of one trial learning. My wife said, "Listen, why the hell don't you speak up and quit trying to control people?" [Laughter] And he spoke up. He had been caught at his game, you see, of controlling, and he knew he was controlling.

00:30:30.440 - 00:30:51.800

I don't know if they said it in other places or not, but you see, every time I was around with that, and his wife, my wife was present, and she was a noxious stimulus in his life. [LAUGHTER] So there's a lot to be said for silence. You can use it in the classroom.

00:30:51.800 - 00:31:06.380

If you've got a classroom that can move through disturbed kids, you see, you can play the game of silence invented by Alfred Bonet, who was also an educator, not just a guy who

00:31:06.380 - 00:31:19.500

had an intelligence test. And he would play this little game with students. and recommended for teachers to plug into their daily or weekly exercise.

00:31:19.500 - 00:31:30.020

You see, you don't wanna play any game too often because it's routine and it gets in the habit of being bored. You would go in with the rest of the class,

00:31:30.020 - 00:31:43.900

today we're having a game for you. You're going to see who can be silent the longest. What you can see is you have a very disturbed class, You know, lots of activity and lots of things going on.

00:31:43.900 - 00:32:11.380

Here you're calling into play the competition and rivalry in terms of human motivation. You're saying, "The one who can be silent the longest and sit quietly in the seat gets to dust the erasers today." That's an old-fashioned reward. You know, I'm used to get--

00:32:11.380 - 00:32:20.380

to go out of class. And dusty erasers? Any of you ever get that joyful activity? Well--

00:32:20.380 - 00:32:31.360

On the wild side. Yeah. There were several ways of reinforcement that went on in the class whenever

00:32:31.360 - 00:32:43.660

I was in the first grade. When I was in the first grade, we have a guy in there that we call the giant because he was something on the order of five years older

00:32:43.660 - 00:32:56.340

than anybody else in class. He didn't wash back repeatedly. That's what they did then was tell the folks you know you just kept washing back staying in the same grade. So it was always a

00:32:56.340 - 00:33:07.620

competitive exercise to see who got the best the erasers because we always knew Bob was going to be chosen because the teacher wanted to dump came out of the class.

00:33:07.620 - 00:33:27.920

So Bob was getting a reward that most of the class members got for reciting well or spelling something correctly. Another consideration in social motivation. And all this stuff's got something

00:33:27.920 - 00:34:02.820

to say about how we learn and how rapidly we learn. This has to do with problems of arousal and this classical method for establishing a motivational or drive state. in animals and humans is deprivation. If we want to be certain that arousal is

00:34:02.820 - 00:34:18.180

at a high level in domesticated white rats, we give them a little bit of hunger buildup, you know? It's deprivation. Or we restrict their movement in some way.

00:34:18.180 - 00:34:34.460

That's deprivation. And this has to do with establishing a mooring state. Now we don't do that experimentally with humans, but this is a rare kind of activity.

00:34:34.460 - 00:34:48.780

Ansel Keys at the University of Minnesota did a study on semi-starvation in humans during World War II. It's a classic in what happens

00:34:48.780 - 00:35:13.780

when people exist at the near starvation level. And these were a bunch of guys who wouldn't go to the service in World War II. And in World War II it was different than Vietnam, you know. People put stars in their window, you know, a sun and a service.

00:35:13.780 - 00:35:27.780

Some people had five stars in the window. And then the color of the stars, they noted, the ones that was killed in action. And there was 13 and a half million men on their arms. That was a big war.

00:35:27.780 - 00:36:05.780

And the invasion of Normandy, they killed more on D-Day than the Vietnam War altogether in six years. That's good killing. Well, these guys were asked to volunteer for something that would have some merit in terms of medical information and knowledge, and they volunteered. They became semi-stars. Their fantasies ranged life, food, bands with tables loaded with chow,

00:36:05.780 - 00:36:39.780

Sexual activity and sexual ideas just pop totally out of the picture almost. Their arousal was solely in terms of what they were deprived of. Well, there are two classes of methods by which humans are classed. As to the motivational status, you can try the standard psychometric procedure.

00:36:39.780 - 00:37:19.780

You can give anxiety scales, the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. You can employ the pneumatic apnoeception test, which is a projective personality test that gets at a certain underlying point. Or you can try rating scales. These are all psychometric procedures to classify people differently as to underlying states. And then you can avoid arousal conditions such as electric shock or artificially induced stress and so on.

00:37:19.780 - 00:37:43.760

Let's see if arousal does generate a more relative state. then there ought to be some correlative evidence physiologically. And [INAUDIBLE]

00:37:43.760 - 00:38:08.740

an independent text on motivation theory indicates that this is the best way to really get at what we're working on around. You take such measures as the electroencephalogram, galvanic skin response, things of this nature,

00:38:08.740 - 00:38:33.800

by which you can actually know that a person is in a high arousal state. [ Silence ] Well, that's enough of that stuff. That brings us automatically to the question,

00:38:33.800 - 00:38:53.480

can people learn without awareness? Of course. For example, going back on my major in English 300 in undergraduate days, I can think

00:38:53.480 - 00:39:06.640

of a way of getting at this problem of learning without awareness. And here's what we do. I'm engaged in individual conversation

00:39:06.640 - 00:39:32.080

with, say, any one member of the group here. And suppose it gets around and gravitates to the topic of your family in some way or another. So a proper name is introduced, John, into the conversation. You introduce John into the conversation, and John's your cousin.

00:39:32.080 - 00:40:06.080

And when you say John, and I have already concluded that the first word uttered that is a proper noun will be smiled and nodded approvingly. And if you use it again, I smile and nod approvingly and look very interested. And the first thing you know, John is going to clog the conversation. Now you see, that's conditioning without awareness in a verbal domain.

00:40:06.080 - 00:40:24.080

You could perhaps do that on adjectives and other things, but that's just a simple illustration of how people learn without awareness. Now there's another kind of learning without awareness. It's called incidental learning.

00:40:24.080 - 00:40:57.440

And the textbooks in mental retardation are full of this garbage that indicates retardates are notoriously poor incidental learners and so you have to specifically teach them in the certain... I maintain that retarded who are of educable variety are proportionately as good at learning incidentally as normal.

00:40:57.440 - 00:41:24.800

Think of all the nonsense retarded of the educable level. No. I may say in my mind that there is no way that I am going to learn television commercial. I don't want to learn that.

00:41:24.800 - 00:41:51.240

I may put it in my mind that I don't want to learn anything about public law 88-164 and that sort of stuff. But you see around universities particularly during the era of the grants that was the 1960s whenever it wasn't for the grants that train teachers.

00:41:51.240 - 00:42:23.040

Oh you've got to do the right another grant. And each law became deal. 164. I studiously tried to avoid learning any of them. But I did. Because they were repeated so often by my colleagues that I couldn't escape it. That's incidental learning. We started to have a lot of incidental learning that occurred.

00:42:23.040 - 00:43:08.040

And proportionate to their intelligence, they will learn as much incidentally as we do. And so you ought to capitalize on incidental learning. Now you see, if learning without awareness has any use practically, how could we use this in a classroom setting for the handicapped people? Use your own background and think of some way to use it.

00:43:08.040 - 00:43:25.280

Well, let's see. I might give as an example, you can claim or fake that you have a bad throat. And you can enhance the attention of the class,

00:43:25.280 - 00:43:46.460

possibly. I told you very softly that I had a bad throat. That's why I said the example I gave earlier. This might elevate the tension, and you might get them to learn more than they want to.

00:43:46.460 - 00:44:16.460

Now, incidental learning has a definition that goes like this. It's learning that occurs without any formal instruction or intent to learn. and without any ascertainable motive. Now, because we can't infer that the learner has some motive, we can't infer that the learner has some motive. ascertainable motive.

00:44:16.460 - 00:44:49.900

Now, because we can infer that the learner has some motive operative, it doesn't I mean, there is one existence that could be a motive. In fact, there are a number of theorists, you know,

00:44:49.900 - 00:45:10.080

that think there's always some motive operative in learning. But if we can't really isolate a motive, then we say it's incidental learning. [Silence]

00:45:10.080 - 00:45:18.580

How many of you know any television commercials? [Silence] A lot of you. [Silence]

00:45:18.580 - 00:45:37.580

Everybody here can probably conjure up a mental image of the Exxon symbol, you know, the tiger, and logos of beer companies. Stuff like that. That's incidentally learned.

00:45:37.580 - 00:46:01.140

Nobody really consciously, or most people consciously, don't set about learning the great seal of Jack's beer, or Pearl, or Budweiser, or any other. So in my experience now with retarded, it has been that they have a large repertoire

00:46:01.140 - 00:46:35.140

of learnings that are like our learnings, simple, that don't mean anything. And the teacher's job is to trap them into learnings, both formally, instruction-wise, by staging the screen so that they will learn a lot of what's important incidentally. Now the Cleveland method of doing business in this is very simple.

00:46:35.140 - 00:47:00.880

The first thing you do is tell the class to take out a piece of paper. to be in a very obedient class, no one did so. Think in terms of your own daily life routine. Think of how many things you do

00:47:00.880 - 00:47:23.380

when you could be doing something simultaneously, by way of learning. Take a guy at the mirror in the morning shaving. If I had used my noodle, you see, in that rhetoric class that I took five times before I passed it,

00:47:23.380 - 00:47:56.380

if I had used my head, I would have had all the rules of grammar pasted on the mirror, so that I could add it to my learning time. When you're sitting on the throne in the morning, it's a place to read. If you had a blackboard beside you, you could write a little graffiti, especially if you're a male.

00:47:56.380 - 00:48:12.380

I don't know anything about female restrooms, but I've been in restrooms all over the United States and overseas. And the male animal, characteristically, writes little verses. I don't know whether females do that or not. Do females do that? They do.

00:48:12.380 - 00:48:31.380

So you see, here's another opportunity to trap this kid. Look, here's a boy with jaundice in the elementary school. Male or female, that makes two. And you put blackboards on there and you encourage writing.

00:48:31.380 - 00:48:42.380

Isn't writing something you want them to learn? Okay, so every once in a while you get a four letter word streaming out. That's alright. You can practice a four letter word.

00:48:42.380 - 00:49:07.820

There are good four letter words, you know. So you catalog, first of all, the downtime that exists by retarded, crippled, blind, and so on. Shaving, grooming, meal time.

00:49:07.820 - 00:49:22.960

People have to ride the bus. It's another incidental learning opportunity. Madison Avenue types use it all the time, you know. They have cutty sark ads on the city buses.

00:49:22.960 - 00:49:35.080

They got go to Hialeah Downs advertised. Listen to KNOW is advertised. And people learn these things, incidentally, if they ride the bus.

00:49:35.080 - 00:49:48.160

When I put them in school buses, making them requirements for school buses. As a taxpayer, I'm sick of the school bus just driving and picking up kids when

00:49:48.160 - 00:50:29.320

they could be learning. We might even get them out of school sooner and they'd reduce the tax. Everybody in the world would faint. So you know these downsides. With learning experience, you mimic the people who are successful in marketing and selling people things they don't want. That's the strategy of a teacher, I would say. I'm not talking teaching the handicapped or any other group.

00:50:29.320 - 00:50:51.320

Crap them into buying something. My first grade teacher had to crap us. She sure would have been a slave woman, really, because she was a pretty good teacher. She had to trap us into wanting to learn the alphabet.

00:50:51.320 - 00:51:17.320

At that point in time, I couldn't see any real use for it. Oh well, grown-ups could say the opposite, but I didn't see that as a need to copy them necessarily. What I learned from the grown-ups was the right to command and control them. And they were unwilling to give that up, you see.

00:51:17.320 - 00:51:33.320

So you create a need or a tension. And it's hard to guide them. Yes, Staub was supposed to learn. That's the whole point.

00:51:33.320 - 00:51:52.520

Staub, in his theory, he said, If you can instigate some kind of a tension in the organization, then their major laws-- the law of pragmatics, the law of closure, et cetera--

00:51:52.520 - 00:52:04.960

can be brought into play. [INAUDIBLE] I just thought of something my roommate said when we got here a few years ago.

00:52:04.960 - 00:52:27.460

Black guy from a pretty rough section of Dallas. He had studied French for about two weeks and he went to that one night and that mate said, "This is all real fine, little mate. What I want to know is what good is school for me and a rock climber?" [inaudible] Yeah, well, it wouldn't really do too much good, I don't suppose. There wouldn't be a lot of transfer, you see.

00:52:27.460 - 00:52:43.960

Learning French would not necessarily help you in a street brawl. What? If you learn French slang, you can cuss a guy out in a foreign language and he might not even know you insulted him.

00:52:43.960 - 00:53:03.960

What a bit of good motivation. Yeah, well, it might be nice to just wear some necessary glasses because, you know, like, Russian is not too commonly spoken around various parts of Texas. I suppose you can tell people that way, but...

00:53:03.960 - 00:53:41.380

I didn't give you the stuff on the mental health psychology yet, did I? [INAUDIBLE] I need to get a little bit more about it, you know. All this [INAUDIBLE] has to do with a cognitive approach to learning. In contrast, let's say, Edward L. Fondey and his stimulus response psychology.

00:53:41.380 - 00:53:55.960

psychology. The Gestaltists, you see, are willing to infer certain mental sets

00:53:55.960 - 00:54:08.780

that are causing destruction. And the SR crowd, they gotta have connection, stimulus, response,

00:54:08.780 - 00:54:24.380

and as Darnedike puts it, [INAUDIBLE] And Gestaltus toyed with the idea of insightful or understanding learning.

00:54:24.380 - 00:55:01.840

And the stimulus response toys are not overenthusiastic about the role of insight in learning. [ Inaudible ] later in this movement. I think I've already mentioned it.

00:55:01.840 - 00:55:20.840

We're all at the University of Berlin, or in Germany, somewhere. Wertheimer was the founder of the movement. W-E-R-T-H-E-I-M-E-R.

00:55:20.840 - 00:55:44.840

And there were a couple of other partners in this act of asylum. Wolfgang Kehler, K-O-E-H-L-E-R, wrote a little poem called "The Mentality of Apes." And if you haven't read it, don't snog it. Because it's pretty interesting.

00:55:44.840 - 00:56:24.840

And this was translated about 1924 into English and it got wide circulation in the psychological communities in this country. And then the third member of this infamous trio was a guy named Kirk Coulson, K-O-S-S-K-A. And he wrote a book called The Growth of the Mind. Now, Kahler was the ape man.

00:56:24.840 - 00:56:48.840

That's the mnemonic he represented in the copy of the ape. He went to the island of Tenerife, that's off the coast of Africa, and he set up a little colony of chimpanzees and remained for some time, studying them principally

00:56:48.840 - 00:57:09.840

with two methods of approach. One, the famous stick puzzle, and two, the famous box problem. His most intelligent chimpanzee was a male named Sultan.

00:57:12.340 - 00:57:30.540

And the first of the box problems, and I'll give you this box problem first. Here's the test chamber. Then it's the mass.

00:57:30.540 - 00:57:57.460

And here's our old buddy, Sultan, principal actor. And over here, against the wall, I see a box. After he's reasonably convinced that Sultan would like to have a banana, rather than starve to death,

00:57:57.460 - 00:58:16.940

he introduces Sultan into the test chamber. And this knowledgeable old chimp fiddles around, jumps, can't reach him, frets, becomes very active, movement, lots of movement, you know.

00:58:16.940 - 00:58:36.260

Jumps again, nothing, continuous jumping after the banana boat because he's really getting longer. Finally, as the ape man described it, that's Gailor. He drives towards the box,

00:58:37.460 - 00:59:04.460

You step out there, stand on top, jump, and get the banana. That's one box problem. Now, the second type of box problem, and only Sultan was able to do this. He introduced the banana at a higher level, the easy, tricky, and put in two boxes.

00:59:04.460 - 00:59:32.460

And no chimp except Sultan was able to solve that one. But you see once Sultan did this, and this is the key in insight, Martin, is that it is immediately available then and there. And the next time he was introduced into the cage it was a single box problem. It was instantaneous, automatic, and it was in.

00:59:32.460 - 00:59:49.460

And here it says, this kind of learning is a heapsize difference in this stimulus response or classical conditioning. This is the aha. Now the stick problem, everybody knows the stick problem. So, an old sultan got in on this idea.

00:59:49.460 - 01:00:18.460

This time, he drove old sultan in the cage. And Sultan began hungry. He seemed to be perpetually hungry. At any rate, the bananas are outside the cage. So finally, the problem solution, you see, involved the use of a stick as a tool.

01:00:18.460 - 01:00:53.460

And so Sultan finally got the al-ha, picked up the stick, reached out, and managed to put the banana in the cage, or to grasp, and then he brought him on in. Then Keira did another ugly thing. He made the problem tougher. He put in two sticks, like fishing poles, that had to be joined in order to reach the banana. Again, the old sultan rose to the task and accomplished this.

01:00:53.460 - 01:01:16.940

You can set a million problems, you see, just like this. Any of you had any insight learning occur to you recently? Isn't it the best kind of learning, really? When you're fumbling around for an idea,

01:01:16.940 - 01:01:30.860

or you're fumbling around for the solution to something, and all of a sudden it just comes together, that's a relief. It's not the struggle.

01:01:30.860 - 01:01:49.500

It's not the trial and error learning that Thorndike was known for. [ Silence ] As I mentioned earlier.

01:01:49.500 - 01:01:57.480

[ Silence ]