Education Quote by Edward Thorndike

Thorndike’s sentence reads like a mission statement for the age when schooling stopped pretending it was only about “cultivating minds” and started acting like a technology of measurable change. The key word is “changes”: education isn’t a sacred inheritance or a leisurely enrichment; it’s an intervention. He places “intellects, characters and behavior” on the same operating table, collapsing the old hierarchy that treated knowledge as noble, morals as private, and behavior as merely disciplinary. In Thorndike’s psychological universe, all three are modifiable outcomes.

The four-part breakdown - aims, materials, means, methods - is deliberately industrial. It frames education as engineering: define the target, choose inputs, pick tools, apply procedures. Subtextually, it smuggles in a provocative claim about power. If education is “concerned” with altering character and behavior, then schools are not neutral conveyors of information; they are institutions authorized to shape people. That’s not necessarily sinister, but it is political, because it begs the question: whose aims?

Context matters: Thorndike helped build early 20th-century educational psychology, an era obsessed with efficiency, testing, and standardization. His language echoes that moment’s faith in expertise and measurement - and its blind spots. By turning education’s messy moral and cultural debates into “problems” to be sorted into categories, he offers clarity and control, while risking the flattening of human development into what can be designed, administered, and assessed.