Behavior mod: Euphemicism for a Kind of Psychogenocide

by David Weinberg

Otherwise, life goes on quietly at Marquette with little indication officials may face legal and fiscal trouble ahead. For the prisoner, that trouble could mean, if nothing else, the end of a program that never stops watching them through the walking hours of the day.
The public school system has felt the effects of behavior modification probably more than the prison system, but the battles over it have been much less intense. Only a few concerned parents and some administrators have raised their voices.
And vets its use in the classroom is certainly no less experimental than behind prison bars. Excent peharps, that it is less directly manipulative since it is most often used in conjuction with other teaching methods.
But an uncomfortable number of school personnel are interested an its function as a disciplinary tool.
To a casual observer, the Mark Twain public school in Maryland  

Maryland is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
 
 
  is as normal and as American as its name. But subtle differences appear after an hour or two inside, like the video cameras mounted in the corners of the classrooms. Revolving ceaselessly, noiselessly, overhead they are a permanent record of every word, action and expression registered by the students.

 
Sometimes we’ll want to show a kid how they’re behaving says school psychologist Steve Johnson. With the cameras we can confront them afterwards, and say You behavedthis way, and then show it to them.

Between the video tapes, point system, evaluations, compliment cards, and T-A  

Transactional analysis is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social interactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator as a basis for understanding behavior.Maryland is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
 
 
 
 
  sessions the school has designed a program in which the children can probably never forget how they behave.
Mark Twain is one public school which uses behavior mod as an overall approach to teaching and managing children who have been disciplinary problems in the regular school system.
Johnson said,

 
I don’t know, I wonder sometimes if we have too … too much control over this kids. If you consider how much effect we can have on these lives — sometimes it reminds me of the which — hunting in Salem,  
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693.
 
 
  or the German persecution of the Jews.
The Persecution of Jews has been a major event in Jewish history, prompting shifting waves of refugees and the formation of diaspora communities.

 

Johnson is a young, native Nebraskan  
The Nebraska is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States.
 
 
  who is unusually honest in appraising the virtues and deficiences of his own school.

 
But it bothers me sometimes, like we’re saving to the kid this is the way you have to be even if they’re not that way.

Teachers evaluate their students at the beginning and end of every class hour. Students can use points to buy extra food and small models. One behavior mod-style school in Washington D.C. The Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly called Washington or D.C., is the capital city of the United States.
 
 
 
  actually has somrone specially assigned to monitor the class and keep a running tab of the student’s points on the blackboard.
There aren’t many schools in this country that use behavior modification to the extent that Mark Twain does. But many classrooms do use it in some form.
One University Education School official estimates that 85 — 90 per cent of the school’s graduates come out with some exposure to behavior mod techniques, and about 49 — 60 per cent graduate with a working knowledge of them.
Ed. school prof. Finley Carpenter, author of the Skinner Primer claimes noted behaviorist B.F. Skinner made the whole thing look.

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Kathleen Stein. King of Worm Runners

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Although I certainly did violate them. At the same time I thought many of my attackers were not all that intelligent, and that those who were bright were blinded by prejudice and emotionality. Now, however, I would probably view them as defending their egos. We did rather rip apart some deeply felt, almost religious beliefs about the mind.

Most neurophysiologists in the Fifties and Sixties spent their lives studying the brain with electrical probes, thinking chemical events to be derivative:

 
The memory-transfer research contradicted not one, but at least a dozen, of the acts of faith on which neuropsychology had been founded, he said. We might as well have presented the pope with evidence that Mary was a whore, Jesus was a homosexual, and God was a black woman living in South Dakota. For we had really pulled the props out from under most scientists who thought they knew what the mind was. And the soul.
I suspect that if the response to our work had been more logical and less emotional, the Digest would never have been born and my own image as a humorist would have been confined to classroom iconoclasms.

Bernard Agranoff and Roger Sperry are only two of the eminent neuroscientists who told McConnell that if he were right, all of their life’s work was for naught. Sir John Eccles went further. As a devout Catholic, he worked out the mind/body/soul problem in a personal way. According to McConnell, Eccles believes in free will, yet he apparently had early difficulties resolving this concept with mechanistic physiology. So he put God at the synapse as a sort of Brownian movement of molecules. He once told me. McConnell remembered,.

 
he couldn’t believe in my work because it violated everything he knew about God. At the time I grew furious with him. I now wish I’d had better sense.

Today there is growing suspicion that thoughts and feelings may one day be traced to chemical events. Such thinking makes the transfer effect less dubious. Very little is known about what makes the brain tick. New neural connections are made, but no one has yet explained how.

 
I think what we were doing was tapping into chemicals that are released from one neuron to another, McConnell explained, putting into the system chemicals that caused neural growth to occur in a patterned way. This suggests that the proteins are actually ‘brief revisions’ of the neural blueprint you were born with. In the animal studies the injected RNA told the neurons what new synaptic connections to make for learning to occur. When this blueprints were transferred from one animal to another, they gave the creature the molecular pattern it would otherwise have had to build up through experience.
But the field has gone by me, McConnell admits, I wouldn’t know a molecule if it jumped up and bit me. What must be done next will be done by biochemists and neurophysiologists, and the next breakthroughs will reveal what the hell does happen chemically in the brain.

What do researchers in the biological basis of behavior say? Most restrict themselves to investigations at the neurotransmitter level. New York University professor of neurology and physiology David Quartermain admits that he is skeptical of the transfer theory, but he is willing to grant that

 
there was some suggestion that something was transferred in those studies.
I don’t think they can be discounted as wrong, he says nor do I think McConnell and Ungar are charlatans. I think perhaps the something transferred might be a motivational factor, but given the structure of the mammalian nervous system – with all its exquisite detail – these complicated structural relationships suggest memory storage is more complex than we know now.

Nor does Quartermain, who is investigating protein-synthesis inhibition in the brain and looking for a way to ease memory disorders, discount the possibility that protein is a key element in memory.

 
There’s got to be something to produce the change, if that change is durable. There have been some very elegant and informative experiments in which you train animals and see whether there are changes in the species of RNA or protein after training. Some of these experiments suggest that there is. I think this is area that will be understood within the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.

McConnell wryly points out that some RNA experiments have been done on humans – in organ-transplant recipients.

 
It’s seldom talked about in literature, and I can’t give you any data on it, but it will be confirmed by any doctor working in the field. About fifty to sixty percent of the transplant patients show temporary psychotic symptoms after transplant. In kidney transplants it’s closer to ninety-five percent. No psychiatrist or psychologist measured them for possible memory shadows: I’m sure they’re picking up memories, or behavioral tendencies, from the donor.