Prime éducation et principes behavioristes: Watson et l'art de modeler les enfants

Abstract

The last work published by Watson as an academic is dated 1920. It deals with the conditioning of fear in a young child, little Albert. Starting with that single case experiment, the present paper is based on Watson's publications after 1920, consisting mainly in books and journal paperswritten for a layreadership, inwhichhe attempted to demonstrate the potential applications of the behaviorist theory, especially to child education. To that aim, he made his own concepts already familiar in numerous publications on child rearing in his days, which be coated with assertive rhetorics. Watson was concerned with substituting a truly scientific project to the obscurantism of traditional education. Traditional parental authority was to be replaced by arational authority based on scientific knowledge. By shaping the malleable clay which the baby is at birth, one would inculcate respect for order and obedience to rules, typical values of the middle class, confident in the universality of its world view.