deschooling

n. an informal movement in the late 1960s and 1970s that criticized the formal educational system for emphasizing a narrow idea of academic knowledge and ignoring people’s real-life experience and the wider social context in which all learning takes place. Such thinkers and polemicists as Austrian-born U.S. writer Ivan Illich (1926–2002) sought to separate education from its institutional context and to promote the idea of informal lifelong learning. —deschool vb.

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Psychology term of the day

January 29th 2025

natural reinforcer

a stimulus or circumstance, such as food or water, that is inherently reinforcing and does not depend on learning to become desirable. Natural reinforcers are more precisely known as unconditioned or primary reinforcers (see primary reinforcement), in contrast to conditioned or secondary reinforcers, which are initially neutral stimuli (e.g., tones, lights) that become desirable through training (see secondary reinforcement).