Classical Conditioning Vs Operant Conditioning Essay

Learning in its most basic form is our minds associating one thing with another. Digging deeper reveals that there are trends in how human beings and animals learn by association, usually this is done by a brain connecting one event to another. The two different ways a brain tends to learn is through either classical conditioning or operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning to associate one stimulus with another stimulus, and Operant Conditioning is learning by associating a response or behavior with a consequence. Knowing how people and animals learn is an important piece of knowledge if one is to help benefit the greater good. One way that classical conditioning can be used to better society is through forms of controlling

Considering this would be implemented on children, who can’t consent legally, would parents be ok with their children becoming puppets? Certain parents would and certainly some wouldn’t. Most would object to the government intervening in raising their children. Some would consider this a form of harm being done to children and would object. Even when consent would be given, it wouldn’t be a good form of informed consent, because the whole idea of population control is to have the population as little informed as possible. Confidentiality would be possible, but debriefing wouldn’t. As soon as you told someone that they had been conditioned to be obedient, some would try and break the control, and all of this makes the system flawed, if not

Parents wouldn’t object as much as they would to the mind control, as there isn’t any real harm being done to the children. The entire system works off of positive re-enforcement, so risk of harm being done to a child is minimal. A school could inform their students every step of the way that they were helping test game based learning, and students would enjoy it, so keeping children and parents informed would be trivial. Info would remain confidential as individual test grades and scores would not be shared among students. Debriefing would be a breeze due to the transparency the whole system is built