Children--Trained As Animals

"EDWARD LEE THORNDIKE was born August 31, 1874 in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. Thorndike was trained in the new psychology by the first generation of Wilhelm Wundt’s protegés.… He went to graduate school at Harvard and studied under psychologist William James. While at Harvard, Thorndike surprised James by doing research with chickens, testing their behavior, and pioneering what later became known as “animal psychology.” As briefly stated by Thorndike himself, psychology was the “science of the intellect, character, and behavior of animals, including man.
"To further excerpt The Leipzig Connection’s excellent treatment of
Thorndike’s background:

 'Thorndike applied for a fellowship at Columbia, was accepted by Cattell, and moved with his two most intelligent chickens to New York, where he continued his research and earned his Ph.D. in 1893. Thorndike’s specialty was the “puzzle box,” into which he would put various animals (chickens, rats, cats) and let them find their way out by themselves.... Cattell advised Dean [James Earl] Russell to visit Thorndike’s first classroom at Western Reserve: “Although the Dean found Thorndike ‘dealing with the investigations of mice and monkeys,’ Dean came away satisfied that Thorndike was worth trying out on humans (emphasis by blog author).” Russell offered Thorndike a job at Teachers College, where the experimenter remained for the next thirty years. Thorndike was the first psychologist to study animal behavior in an experimental psychology laboratory and (following Cattell’s suggestion) apply the same techniques to children and youth; as one result, in 1903, he published the book Educational Psychology. In the following years he published a total of 507 books, monographs, and articles. Thorndike’s primary assumption was the same as Wundt’s: that man is an animal, that his actions are actually always reactions, and that he can be studied in the laboratory in much the same way as an animal might be studied. Thorndike equated children with the rats, monkeys, fish, cats, and chickens upon which he experimented in his laboratory and was prepared to apply what he found there to learning in the classroom. He extrapolated “laws” from his research into animal behavior which he then applied to the training of teachers, who took what they had learned to every corner of the United States and ran their classrooms, curricula, and schools, on the basis of this new “educational” psychology.'"

(The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, pg. 4-5; ch. 1)