Systems Thinking and 21st Century Education. A Case Study of an American Model for High School Educational Reform

Stein's advanced education began at Harvard in the 1890s, where she studied mainly psychology, and ended at Johns Hopkins at the turn of the century, where she studied brain anatomy. Both of these educational experiences suggest provocative sources for The Making of Americans. Stein's Harvard research (which was published as "Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention," in The Psychological Review, 1898) was based on experiments with Harvard and Radcliffe students. It addressed the question of how automatic behavior can be cultivated in human subjects; how can subjects be made to internalize suggested actions as their own habits? Among the issues that Stein's experiment takes up is the question of gender difference: is there a consistent opposition between male and female responses to suggested action? Another is the problem of change: once learned, how can subjects be induced to abandon old actions and adopt new ones? Stein's research produced its own catalog of human types. Type I, "girls. . found naturally in literature courses" and men bound for law, is "nervous, high-strung, very imaginative." Type II, "blond and pale," is "distinctly phlegmatic," a general "New England" type that is repressed and selfconscious ...»