of Chicago. Second, in any group experiment there is the problem of experimenter interference. Bloom notes "one method of appraising the level of time-on-task is by observing at various intervals whether or not a particular student is overtly engaged in the learning--" and then "a second method is to determine the extent to which the student is covertly (in thought) engaged in the learning. There are various methods (stimulated recall, interviews, or questionnaires)" (3). The problem here is that the researcher is making the student aware of being watched by a lot of adults who will be quizzing him on what was taught. The student knows someone is watching, does not expect to be able to slink into the woodwork and hide, and the student pays attention. What the student does when the researcher leaves is another matter. This was demonstrated when researchers wanted to study the effects of lighting on worker performance. They increased the lighting in the work area and workers performed better. They decreased the lighting and workers performed better. Workers performed better, the researchers found, because they were watched. Likewise, the author does not consider the possibility that students simply will not learn because they do not want to, unless someone stands over them constantly.
Bloom speaks of a period of "innocence in education," by which he means that educators did not really know much about what they did and how well it worked. He states that his main desire is therefore "the systematic ordering of our basic knowledge in such a way that what is known and true can be acted on" (15). The problem is that what is "known and true" is largely a matter of faith, not fact. The most pervasive and well-known example is evolutionism, the hypothesis that one species evolved from another, all originating with one spark of spontaneous life. This philosophy is necessarily atheistic; Dewey and Bloom believe it and apply it throughout their...