At the turn of the century, a dominant conception of the child as learner was that he was cognitively an empty organism' responding more or less randomly to stimulation, and characteristically learning when specific responses were connected with specific stimuli through the meditation of pleasure or pain. The organism itself, it was believed, would do nothing to learn or think if it were not impelled to such activity by primary drives like hunger or thirst or by externally applied motives like reward and punishment Experimenters in the laboratory were connecting correct responses of animals to puzzle boxes by giving or withholding food and teachers in the classroom were connecting correct responses of children to problem cards by giving or withholding approval.
In painting to this aspect of the turn-of-the-century view of the learner, I do not mean to derogate the historic achievement of the connectionist formulation of learning. But the essential point remains, a conception of the learner as an ideational& empty organism associating discrete stimuli and responses through the operation of rewards and punishments under the control of the teacher. Both the stimulus- what was supposed to be learned - and the response - what was actually learned- were believed to be determined by the teacher. It a was no accident that the materials and methods of instruction and the form of the classroom were teacher-centred. The teacher was necessarily placed in front of the classroom -sometimes on dais or platform - and the pupils in chairs rigidly fastened to the floor in straight rows facing forward so they would not turn away from the only source of the learning experience: the teacher. Given this contemporary vision of the learner, what could be a more eminently practical and sensible image of the ideal learning environment? Indeed, there is a letter by John Dewey dating from this period in which he complains that when he was trying to equip his new school according to his different conception of child as learner, he was unable to find any other kind of classroom furniture
The early child was thought of as
