Discover the shocking origins of the “Leipzig Connection” and the deliberate sabotaging of sound pedagogy in American education! This explainer video, based on the arresting report by author Paolo Lionni, details the tragic transformation of the national character through the rise of scientific psychology.
Learn how the 19th-century educational system, which once nurtured the American dream, began to change, eventually leading to schools “infested with drugs and crime“ and students graduating who could “barely read, spell, or do simple arithmetic”.
Key Figures and the Birth of Experimental Psychology
The transformation began with Wilhelm Wundt (born 1832), the founder of experimental psychology. Based at the University of Leipzig, Germany, Wundt established the world’s first psychological laboratory in 1875. Wundt proposed redefining psychology from the study of the soul (psyche) to the measurable study of experience, asserting that man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism. His theoretical work laid the philosophical basis for the principles of conditioning later developed by Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner.
Wundt’s students, including the notable Americans G. Stanley Hall (who founded the American Journal of Psychology and the American Psychological Association) and James McKeen Cattell (Wundt’s first assistant and major publicist), brought this “new” psychology to the United States.
The American Implementation: Dewey, Thorndike, and Teachers College
The Wundtian methodology was cemented by influential figures like John Dewey and Edward Lee Thorndike. Dewey, Hall’s mentor, established the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago (1896) to test psychological principles. Dewey championed “Progressive Education”, shifting education from teaching mental skills to feeding experiential data to the nervous system, focusing instead on the child’s socialization and adaptation to “social ends”.
Thorndike, trained by Wundt’s protégés Armstrong and Judd, became a crucial professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College (TC). He pioneered “animal psychology” (experimenting on cats, rats, and chickens) and applied these same stimulus-response techniques to children. Thorndike explicitly defined the art of teaching as “the art of giving and withholding stimuli with the result of producing or preventing certain responses”, operating on the “law of effect” (reinforcing pleasurable actions). Thorndike advocated de-emphasizing formal education (the 3 R’s), claiming subjects like arithmetic and history were intrinsically of “little value”.
The Rockefeller Funding Monopoly and Social Control
Crucially, the explainer video reveals how this new psychology intersected with unlimited wealth. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., through his chief philanthropic advisor Frederick Taylor Gates, and his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr., set up the General Education Board (GEB) to create a philanthropic monopoly. Gates articulated the GEB’s goal: to train rural folk “as we find them... We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning”.
The GEB provided the crucial funding, helping Teachers College, led by Dean James Earl Russell, achieve a “meteoric rise” and become the fourth largest graduate school in the nation by 1912. This funding provided the wherewithal to spread experimental psychology throughout American education.
The GEB’s reach culminated in the creation of the Lincoln School in 1917, a showplace laboratory school envisioned by GEB secretary Abraham Flexner. Despite being closed in 1946 due to its failure and financial disappointment, the Lincoln School prototype—which even failed to teach Rockefeller, Jr.’s sons to read well—served as a model for creating a national “socialization” curriculum.
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