Thorndike, Edward (1874-1949)
Edward Lee Thorndike was born on August 31, 1874, in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. He died on August 9, 1949, in Montrose, New York. Thorndike proceeded very rapidly through his graduate education. After receiving a B.A. at Wesleyan University in 1895, he transferred to Harvard University, where he received a second B.A. in 1896 and his M.A. the following year. In 1898, Thorndike completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he spent virtually his entire academic career as a professor at Teachers College (1899-1940). While this article will not dwell on Thorndike's achievements in the applied area that came to be called educational psychology, it should be noted that he created that field and developed it during his entire career at Columbia.
Thorndike's experimental studies of learning in monkeys brought him his first position at Teachers College as an instructor in genetic psychology. The dean of Teachers College, James E. Russell, hired Thorndike because he thought those studies to be "a pretty good stepping stone to a study of the nature and behavior of children" (Current Biography, 1941, p. 857). The ingenuity of Thorndike's animal experiments had made a very favorable impression on William James at Harvard, as well as on his major professorsat Columbia, each of whom would have strongly endorsed him for the position in Teachers College.
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