A History of Outcomes-Based Behaviorism for Workforce Education:
Neurocore is also likely to be promoted by captains of industry who seek to capitalize on the company's occupational biofeedback therapies. The Neurocore website states, "[m]any ... business professionals also use neurofeedback to improve mental performance and productivity through increased focus and better stress management." With these neuro-behaviorist applications for businesses to enhance workforce output efficiency, Neurocore's operant-conditioning therapies could be promoted by corporate lobbyists as government-subsidized treatments for occupational-learning disabilities that are paid for by employer-based health insurance. To be sure, Neurocore procedures are already covered by certain insurance providers.
Such subsidies for employer-funded biofeedback therapies would help business partners to fulfill "outcomes-based" workforce-education contracts under public-private partnerships that are being championed by DeVos and the Trump administration. After meeting with seventeen CEOs from megacorporations such as IBM, GE, Walmart, General Motors, PepsiCo, and the Cleveland Clinic during Trump's April 11thStrategy and Policy Forum Listening Session, Secretary DeVos released the following statement from the Department of Ed: "[t]he best workforce is an educated workforce, and this Administration is committed to increasing access to career and technical education for college students and adults alike. By encouraging public-private partnerships, we can help connect students with prospective employers and provide those students with the necessary skills to find a good-paying job in their communities."
To achieve these corporate-fascist workforce planning outcomes, public-private partnerships between businesses and educational institutions will implement a form of outcomes-based education (OBE) methodology, which is deeply rooted in the stimulus-response method of psycho-behavioral conditioning that is the core of Neurocore science. The rationale for outcomes-based workforce education asserts that public-school funding should be contingent upon student attainment of predetermined career-readiness outcomes that can be quantified through standardized tests or performance-based assessments. What better way to control workforce learning outcomes than the scientific method of behaviorist psychological conditioning? Indeed, OBE for workforce training has a long pedagogical history of stimulus-response psycho-behavioral conditioning.
In an article titled "The Death of Free Will (Part 2 of 5)," former senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement for the US Department of Ed, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, explains that "[t]he type of so-called education being promoted throughout the United States is not truly 'education.' It is a system of Skinnerian/Pavlovian group-oriented, collectivist, brainwashing/training in lower level skills and the necessary attitudes and values for the workforce, using the computer (the operant-conditioning machine) in conjunction with 'programmed' learning (mastery learning/direct instruction) software." Iserbyt elaborates that "[t]his is the same Skinnerian Outcomes-Based Education rat lab program ... that was funded by my old office in the U.S. Dept. Of Education" under President Ronald Reagan.
If the Trump Administration lives up to its many historical comparisons to the Reagan Administration, OBE behaviorism for workforce education will be a cornerstone of Trump's education policies. So far, the comparisons have proven to be apt; the University Herald reports that "Betsy DeVos has acknowledged the significant role that community colleges will play in the advancement of President Donald Trump's workforce agenda." At the National Legislative Summit of the Association of Community College Trustees, DeVos stated that community colleges are "absolutely essential engines of workforce and economic development -- locally and regionally ... [Community colleges] help identify and close the skills gap between employers and job seekers, so U.S. businesses and industries can thrive and expand."
Secretary DeVos's commitment to both Trump's workforce education and Neurocore's biofeedback behaviorism is likely to stir up a recipe for revamping Reagan-era OBE workforce behaviorism that was perpetuated under former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB). An example of OBE behaviorism during the reign of NCLB is described in a 2006 scholarly journal article from the School Psychology Review. In this peer-reviewed article titled "Integrating Frameworks from Early Childhood Intervention and School Psychology to Accelerate Growth for All Children," educational psychologists evaluated "patterns of child performance over time and in response to certain stimuli, [so that] conditions, and consequences can be quantified.... to improve child outcomes in a more efficient fashion through iterative problem-solving attempts ... [by] determin[ing] what additional supports and services might be needed and ... whether the additional supports and services are meaningfully accelerating child growth" (VanDerHeyden and Snyder 530).
Clearly, this stimulus-response method of outcomes-based teaching is merely a revision of not only Skinner's operant conditioning, but also the proto-behaviorist psychology of Wilhelm Maximillian Wundt [2]. The founding father of psychological science, Wundt created the world's first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, where he evangelized a cadre of American psychologists, such as G. Stanley Hall [3], James McKeen Cattell, and Charles Judd, who returned to the United States to propagate proto-behaviorist pedagogies for workforce training curriculums (Lionni 1-27; Sutton 63, 85-87, 101-102, 107-109).
By 1948, at least 689 postgraduate students were awarded psychology doctorates from these three Wundtian disciples, Hall, Cattell, and Judd (Sutton 91) [4], many of whom were bankrolled through Rockefeller's GEB funds for school laboratories designed to develop stimulus-response-conditioning methods for corporate-industrial workforce training (Lionni 43-89).
In the 1916 GEB publication Occasional Papers No. 1, Chairman of the GEB, Fredrick T. Gates, professed the corporate-fascist directive of Rockefeller-financed laboratory schools: "[w]e shall not try to make these people or any of their children philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is ... to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are ... and [to] teach them to do in a perfect way what their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm" (6). Stated differently, Gates's mission as GEB Chairman aimed merely to condition the working-class masses to adapt to America's economic evolution from "imperfect" manual labor into "perfect" mechanical labor managed by corporate industrialization for mass production.
A major recipient of GEB funds was Teachers College at Columbia University where E. L. Thorndike conducted stimulus-response experiments on animals such as mice and monkeys to refine proto-behaviorist-conditioning methodologies for collectivist workforce training (Lionni 29-41, 61-65, 72, 78-81). Thorndike asserted that "we believe it will be found that the best interests of the individual and society will be served by providing a certain number of pupils least gifted in intelligence with the equipment needed to begin their vocational career by the completion of the junior high school period or even earlier in a few cases. Other individuals will advance their own welfare and that of society by securing but one more year, others by two, others by three additional years. Thus although the great majority of children should spend some time in the junior high school, not all of them should be expected to continue to the completion of the senior-high-school course. Each child should have as much high+-school work as the common good requires" (qtd. in Lionni 40).
Fast-forward after one hundred years of GEB funding, and compare Thorndike's early system of vocational "tracking" to current "career pathways" curricula, which DeVos is promoting as Secretary of Education. The US Department of Ed issued a press release stating that, on May 9th, Secretary DeVos visited Granite Technical Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, in order to "highlight innovative career pathways for high school students made possible through strong business-education partnerships." In my article entitled "Corporate-Fascist Workforce Training for the Hegelian State," I expound how career pathways are nothing more than job-specific workforce-training curricula that are assigned to students whose learning outcomes "track" them out of traditional academic curricula for university preparation.
Once students are tracked into prescriptive career pathways, Wundtian-Skinnerian stimulus-response pedagogies are applied to achieve workforce planning outcomes in accordance with workforce development mandates under federal laws such as the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act (or Perkins III).
Under such federal workforce-planning laws, even education administrators are psycho-behaviorally conditioned to attain workforce development outcomes through operant-conditioning-management incentives. According to a 2005 scholarly journal article published in New Directions for Institutional Research, educational institutions receiving federal aid under the provisions of WIA and Perkins III must "report outcome data to a central state administrative agency that in turn aggregates these data and reports them to the U.S. Department of Education. Both laws introduced potential rewards and consequences for states that do or do not improve student performance" (Kent 60). Adding another layer of administrative operant conditioning, these financial "rewards ['positive reinforcement'] and consequences ['punishments']" impel educational institutions into regimenting operant conditioning pedagogies in the classroom to achieve government-mandated workforce-training outcomes.
Will DeVos compound yet another layer of stimulus-response conditioning into this corporate-fascist stratagem by using her cabinet position to push Neurocore's occupational-biofeedback therapies as government-subsidized treatments for cognitive-learning disabilities that impede federal workforce-training outcomes? To be sure, the Neurocore Corporation does in fact provide specialized biofeedback therapies for corporate clients through the Neurocore Pro website, which offers biofeedback procedures that can catalyze "higher productivity for a business unit."
On the "Corporate Health" page of the Neurocore Pro website, it describes the company's "Corporate health program, Core Health ... By optimizing the autonomic nervous system, ... we improve productivity and performance in a manner most corporate wellness programs cannot.... We have seen incredible change in the professional athletes, executives, politicians, and entrepreneurs who run our program. Now, we are introducing this program to entire executive teams and business units." If greenlighted by a DeVos Department of Ed, such Neurocore treatments for entire corporate staffs could be adapted to treat entire classes of learning-disabled students who are being trained in career pathways courses to fulfill federal workforce planning outcomes.
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