Ever since the earliest hominid knew something he wanted to share, the human race has been in an eternal struggle to find slightly more effective ways of conveying knowledge and skills. Thousands of years of evolution, Ancient Greece society notwithstanding, culminated in the invention of the ruler, which was not only a tool to measure the dimension of various objects, but it also doubled as a form of negative reinforcement to incentivize poorly performing and troublesome students. In the western world, specifically the United States, people began to turn away from physically abusing students and began to look for more effective ways of educating the nation’s larval citizenry. It would be unfair to speak of education theories without mentioning Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as they together were of the first to put forth an effort towards understanding, among many things, how people think and why. Roughly 2000 years later, there were a growing number of educated individuals beginning to take second look at everything we thought we knew about being human. Among these people, there was Ivan Pavlov, who began ringing a bell, and not only did Clarence get his wings, but what was learned through the well-known story of Pavlov and his dogs also served as the impetus for John Watson and B. F. Skinner and their ground-breaking notion of Behaviorism. Behaviorism, simplified, is the theory that a person is the product of their environment, and to change a person’s behavior, one needs to simply adjust their environment. More specifically, the term behaviorism was coined by John Watson which he defined as a “theoretical perspective in which learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus-response relationships” (Ormrod, 2010). Incidentally, this theory does not counter indicate the use of corporal punishment as a form of stimulus.
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