On Behaviorism

Philosophy of Education: On Behaviorism

Joshua Caesar O. Elegado, 3^rd Year Philosophy

University of Santo Tomas-Legazpi, Philippines

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

-John B. Watson

Behaviorist Education is simply about how the question of stimuli and response is able to set foot in a classroom setting in which makes an individual behaves in a certain or in a particular manner. Behaviorist Education as Philosophy is simply about the conditioning that helps people attain a certain competency through a system of reward and punishment. To analyze, even though conditioning is the aim of the behaviorist education for a student to learn and acquire certain competencies that are needed at their level, we must ensure that these students are people who are free and has their own differences to celebrate with. If such people are always to be boxed and are always to be seen as a response to a stimulus, therefore, we determine the individual and prevent them to experience the freedom, to begin with, we prevent them from being them and we prevent them from being free. To implicate, even if we are excellent in things, we score higher than the others, we are at times better in some categories while some are not, it is because we are all different, sometimes, it is not just the way life is, to be dictated of some sort, that we are to be expected of something, rather, we are just that diverse and different from others and we are unique and we have the freedom as an individual to experience life in the entirety.