Education: Big Chief’s GG

A hypothetical Bill Smith last week arrived in the hypothetical town of Zenith on a business trip. He marched through its marble-lined railroad station, climbed into a shiny taxicab, rode up Zenith’s Main Street, admiring a handsome museum, four handsome churches, a dozen glittering drug stores. After he had dined on excellent roast beef in his hotel, Bill Smith lit a cigar and strolled out to a cinema, making up his mind on the way that he would tell his wife Zenith was a “great town.”

In Columbia University’s Teachers College in Manhattan last week a corps of researchers, up to their elbows in statistical reports, was busy proving Bill Smith wrong. Famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike and his staff were weighing not Zenith’s food or its storefronts but its quality as a place to live.

Having spent nearly a lifetime testing mankind to see what makes the cranial wheels go round, Psychologist Thorndike two years ago began to test U. S. cities to see which ones were fit for mankind to live in. So important did the Carnegie Corp. consider this study that it gave $100,000 to finance it. Dr. Thorndike and his collaborator, Dr. Ella Woodyard, selected 117 middle-sized cities, gathered data about them on some 120 traits. From these he picked 23 items which he thought most people would agree were attributes of a good town—a low death rate, high per capita expenditures for education, libraries, parks and recreation, rarity of extreme poverty, high proportion of home ownership, high proportion of youths over 16 in school, large per capita circulation of good magazines, widespread installation of gas and electricity, excess of doctors, nurses and teachers over male domestic servants. The resultant score he called GG—general goodness—not from the standpoint of sophistication or show, but from the standpoint of health and decency. Conceding that the good life is not the same for all men, Dr. Thorndike selected these criteria because he believed most men prefer to live in cities where babies’ lives are saved, where schools are well provided for, where people live without ostentation, etc. Then he compared other characteristics of a city with its GG to determine whether they were good symptoms or bad. Last week, having confirmed his test’s reliability by trying it out on 193 more cities, Professor Thorndike was able to describe the “good town” in great detail:

¶ It has many cigar stores. Dr. Thorndike’s explanation is that in the good town people practice small vices instead of big ones. “When tobacco was discovered, people who had been flogging slaves and watching bear fights began to get enjoyment instead from a quiet smoke.” But many drug stores are a bad sign. Dr. Thorndike thinks this is true because an inferior town buys many patent medicines and cosmetics.

¶ People in a good city read much, but much that they read is not good. While quality magazines have a large circulation in such a city, so do the confession magazines. Many radios also is a tip-top sign. “The good citizen may not be terribly moral or intellectual, but even third-rate reading and listening to the radio replaces cheap gossip, dirty stories and hanging around saloons.”

¶ Good cities had slightly fewer citizens listed in Who’s Who. “There are too few eminent persons in any town to affect the general score. You don’t get many individuals who read Euripides in the original Greek in Kalamazoo, but you don’t get many in Cambridge, either. . . .”

¶ Size of a city has nothing to do with its GG.

¶, A superior town has female doctors, female clergy (a sign of progressiveness).

¶ It contains comparatively few Negroes.

¶<L Dr. Thorndike was astounded to find fewer ministers in a good town and a slightly negative correlation between the goodness of a city and its church attendance.*

¶ A good town tends to own its water supply and electricity, a bad one to own its cemeteries.

¶ The story of the birth rate, says Dr. Thorndike, is “short but very bitter.” The average number of children per family in good cities is 3.3, in poorer ones, 4.8. “Most of the rising generation is being brought up in the worst communities.”

Dr. Thorndike concludes that the good town is a place where most citizens enjoy the creature comforts, take good care of their own families, live respectable, unpretentious bourgeois lives, that only 35% of a town’s desirability as a place to live is accounted for by wealth and income; 55% depends on the character of the people and 10% on other factors.

Refusing to make public the GG ratings of specific cities until completion of his study, Dr. Thorndike did say suburban cities as a class ranked highest. At the top from the standpoint of per capita income were the Newtons, Boston suburbs, followed by Hartford, Conn.; Easton, Pa., and Cambridge, Mass. At the bottom in income were Augusta, Ga.; Evansville, Ind.; Kansas City, Kans.; Bay City, Mich.; Joplin, Mo.; and Camden, N. J.

Against his objective data Dr. Thorndike matched his own earlier guesses and the ratings by 280 preachers, educators, social workers and businessmen. All of them, including Dr. Thorndike, were wrong. They overvalued size, the presence of eminent men, and externals, undervalued “hick” towns.

Hens. Since everyone considers himself an expert in sizing up a town, and every Bill Smith is sure his own town is the greatest, Edward Lee Thorndike last week was well aware that at 63 he was stepping into the controversy of his life. He is used to controversy by now. The facts ferreted out by his immense curiosity have shocked people for 40 years.

When he was a youngster at Harvard, “Thorny” Thorndike began to study the instincts of chicks in his college lodgings in 1896. His landlady ousted his incubator as a fire hazard. So he moved it to the basement in the house of his teacher, a certain professor named William James. Next year the lad arrived at Columbia University to study under famed Psychologist J. McKean Cattell. Carrying two cages with the “most educated hens in the world,” he sat down to rest on the steps of Seth Low Hall. A porter chased him away.

In a Manhattan apartment Thorndike kept his hens and four monkeys. He invented for his experiments the maze and puzzle box, now standard equipment for psychological work. At 24 Thorndike published his first work, Animal Intelligence. Armchair psychologists, who had not his patience for the laborious pursuit of facts, immediately denounced his conclusions. To them the youngster replied: “What is important is concrete information about particular facts.”

Soon Dr. Thorndike abandoned animals and began to study children, who learn, he found, in the same way as animals. Later he branched out into such varied activities as studying handwriting, counting words, designing intelligence and aptitude tests for the Army in 1917. By 1926, when his admirers attempted to sum up Dr. Thorndike’s work in a special issue of the Teachers College Record, it took 15 eminent scholars in as many fields of learning to appraise his contributions to psychology and education, 25 more to annotate his writings. He has turned out some 40 books, more than 300 articles and reports, an estimated 5,000,000 words and 5,000,000 figures all told.

Thorndike’s Education. The schools of every nation on earth have been profoundly affected by Dr. Thorndike’s facts. An old theory of learning was that certain subjects, particularly the classics, were especially useful for training the mind. Thorndike tried out this theory by experiment and found it did not work. His findings hastened the departure of Latin and Greek from school curricula.

In another great study he demolished the adage that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” He proved that man’s learning speed declines very little between 25 and 45 years, very slowly after that.

Dr. Thorndike’s methods are dramatic, depend considerably on his ingenuity in designing tests. To determine the effect of adults’ prejudices on their attitudes, he asked them how much money they would demand to eat a quarter of a pound of human flesh. To prove that heredity was more important than environment, he tested 50 twins, demonstrated that they were less affected by differences in training than ordinary brothers and sisters.

That tests, like men, are fallible Dr. Thorndike readily admits, but they are better than guesses. His colleagues have often questioned his evidence but rarely with any success his conclusions. When Thorndike declared that “satisfiers” (such as a reward of food) made animals remember the correct acts and thus aided their learning, and that “annoyers” retarded their learning, his contemporaries were skeptical. But many years later Thorndike confirmed his theory of the effect of rewards on learning with what he regards as his most remarkable and conclusive experiment. This was the “spread and scatter” phenomenon. Students who answered a series of nonsense questions not only remembered best the answer that was rewarded with the word “right” but also remembered the answers just preceding and following that answer better than those more distant in time. The experiment proved that reward had far more effect on learning than repetition or punishment.

Like his methods, Dr. Thorndike’s philosophy is not at all metaphysical. Says he: “Thinking is as biological as digestion.”

Education’s Thorndike. The record of the Thorndike family confirms his own emphasis on the importance of heredity. His late brother Ashley was one of the foremost U. S. Shakespearean scholars. Another brother, Lynn, is an authority on medieval history, his sister (now retired) was a brilliant high-school teacher. Of his four children, three are college teachers and the fourth an undergraduate, all unusual scholars.

Big, paunchy and kindly, with thick grey hair falling over his forehead and a droopy grey mustache, Edward Thorndike (affectionately called “The Big Chief” by his associates) still works 70 hours a week. “We have a factory here for finding the truth,” he says. It is a highceilinged, barnlike room in a remote corner of Teachers College, with a little office in the back where Dr. Thorndike sits in a high-backed chair at a rolltop desk. The factory is crammed to the ceiling with manila-wrapped bundles containing tests and data. Dr. Thorndike knows what is in every last one of them.

Each morning Dr. Thorndike spends exactly eight minutes reading the newspaper, each night reads himself to sleep with Punch, a detective story or the encyclopedia. An exceedingly rapid reader, he has read through both the Britannica and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He is colorblind, cannot drive a car. Once, walking with his brother in Boston, he saw a golf club in a store window. They bought it, went home and looked up golf in the encyclopedia, then experimented in the back yard with the one club, a ball and two tomato cans.

Such are his peculiarities, but one thing about him will never be known: his I. Q. Since he devised most intelligence tests and knows all the answers, it is quite useless to try to test him.

*Except attendance in the Unitarian, Universalist and Christian Science churches, which had a high positive correlation with GG.