To be clear, Thorndike was in no way single-handedly responsible for the regularised forms education took around the world in the 20th Century. However, his ideas about learning – that it was quantifiable and that some students were innately better at it than others – supported visions of school where rigidly standardised conditions prevailed, in terms not only of standardised tests but also time spent in seats, classroom sizes and shapes, pedagogy, and metrics of student evaluation. Such interchangeable conditions allowed students to be compared to one another for supposedly meritocratic purposes.
