Creating a "Reason" (that's reasonable, isn't it?)

So, back to schools discussion (humor me!).  Last post I talked about how psychologists a hundred and fifty years ago or so were trying to establish themselves as a legitimate "science," but in order to do so they had to generate something "scientifically experimentable.". The way they figured out how to do that was to eliminate experience and prior knowledge and personal relevance (and thus personhood, when you think about it), and teach and test people on something no one could possibly know or even have a use for, NONsense.  The discovery was that people have a hard time learning nonsense because it's, well, nonsense, and WHO in their right mind wants to work hard at learning meaningless disconnected useless information simply for the sake of learning it?  No one! (no one in their right mind!)

Enter the behavioralists!  They gave people (starting with animals) a "reason" to learn the nonsense that they would otherwise NOT spend time learning (to only forget/brain dump quickly after "learning" it).  They gave "reinforcers"--postive reinforcers (such as cheese at the end of a maze) for right answers to encourage repeats of that behavior (doing/choosing the "right" but non-relevant to anything otherwise personally meaningful answer), and/or negative reinforcers to discourage repeats of other behaviors (doing/choosing the "wrong" answer, or perhaps refusing to participate in the first place because there was no reason to, except for the artificially created reason/reinforcer).

Is any of this sounding familiar to anyone?  Not necessarily the details, but where this is heading?  I'm out of time for this installment, but I foresee part 3 and maybe a part 4 (depending on time blocks available to me).  Oh, and please forgive the typos in these posts--again, with my time availability, typos are low on my list of priorities!