A Behavioral Contribution to an Interpretation of the History of Schooling as a Cultural Practice

Abstract

This is a study undertaken at the interface between behavior analysis, history, and social sciences. The aim was to present a historical interpretation of schooling as a cultural practice to produce certain types of aggregate products as schooled subjects in Western civilization’s modern and contemporary ages. We used concepts of the social sciences, history, and behavior analysis to interpret three canonical works in the field of history of education here assumed to be cultural cusps. We propose that schooling in the modern and contemporary ages shaped different ideal types of aggregate products as a result of successive alterations to the cultural system metacomponents: (a) the Catholic and erudite courtier of the upwardly mobile mercantile society of the sixteenth century; (b) the literate and citizen of the world of the emerging machine manufacturing society of the eighteenth century; (c) the ethical and pragmatic individual of the technological society in place in the twentieth century. Changes in shapes of ideal types of aggregate products along these centuries may be used as important variables to understand educational challenges now faced in the twenty-first century.