160. Miss Skinner Sleeps Scientifically: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Chapter Thirteen 



The Empty Child 

Walden Two (1948) B.F. Skinner. This utopist is a psychologist, inventor of a mechanical 
baby-tender, presently engaged on experiments testing the habit capacities of pigeons. 
Halfway through this contemporary Utopia, the reader may feel sure, as we did, that this 
is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been called "behavioral engineering".... Of all 
the dictatorships espoused by utopists, this is the most pro found.... The citizen of this ideal 
society is placed during his first year in a sterile cubicle, wherein the onditioning 
begins.... In conclusion, the perpetrator of this "modern" Utopia looks down from a 
nearby hill of the community which is his handiwork and proclaims: "I like to play God!" 
— Negley and Patrick, The Quest For Utopia 

Miss Skinner Sleeps Scientifically 

At the university people used to call Kings College before the American Revolution, I 
lived for a time under a psychological regime called behaviorism in the last golden 
moments before Mind Science took over American schooling. At Columbia, I was in on 
the transformation without ever knowing it. By the time it happened, I had shape-shifted 
into a schoolteacher, assigned to spend my adult life as a technician in the human rat cage 
we call public education. 

Although I may flatter myself, for one brief instant I think I was the summer favorite of 
Dr. Fred S. Keller at Columbia, a leading behaviorist of the late 1950s whose own college 
textbook was dedicated to his mentor, B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists 
from Harvard. Skinner was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container 
with a window, much like keeping a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat mis- 
described in the famous article "Baby in a Box," {Ladies Home Journal, September 28, 
1945). 

Italian parents giving their own children a glass of wine in those days might have ended 
up in jail and their children in foster care, but what Skinner did was perfectly legal. For 
all I know, it still is. What happened to Miss Skinner? Apparently she was eventually sent 
to a famous progressive school the very opposite of a rat-conditioning cage, and grew up 
to be an artist. 

Speaking of boxes, Skinner commanded boxes of legal tender lecturing and consulting 
with business executives on the secrets of mass behavior he had presumably learned by 
watching trapped rats. From a marketing standpoint, the hardest task the rising field of 
behavioral psychology had in peddling its wares was masking its basic stimulus-response 
message (albeit one with a tiny twist) in enough different ways to justify calling 
behaviorism "a school." Fat consultancies were beginning to be available in the postwar 
years, but the total lore of behaviorism could be learned in about a day, so its 



embarrassing thinness required fast footwork to conceal. Being a behaviorist then would 
hardly have taxed the intellect of a parking lot attendant; it still doesn't. 

In those days, the U.S. Government was buying heavily into these not-so-secret secrets, 
as if anticipating that needy moment scheduled to arrive at the end of the twentieth 
century when Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies would write fox Harper's 
in a voice freighted with doom: 

The problem is starkly simple. An astonishingly large and increasing number of human 
beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or provide the services that the paying 
customers of the world can afford. 

In the decades prior to this Malthusian assessment, a whole psychological Institute for 
Social Cookery sprang up like a toadstool in the United States to offer recipe books for 
America's future. Even then they knew that 80 percent of the next generation was neither 
needed nor wanted. Remedies had to be found to dispose of the menace psychologically. 

Skinner had wonderful recipes, better than anyone's. Not surprisingly, his procedures 
possessed a vague familiarity to readers listed in the Blue Book or the Social Register, 
people whose culture made them familiar with the training of dogs and falcons. Skinner 
had recipes for bed wetting, for interpersonal success, for management of labor, for 
hugging, for decision-making. His industrial group prepackaged hypotheses to train 
anyone for any situation. By 1957, his machines constituted the psychological technology 
of choice in institutions with helpless populations: juvenile detention centers, homes for 
the retarded, homes for wayward mothers, adoption agencies, orphan asylums — 
everywhere the image of childhood was most debased. The pot of gold at the end of 
Skinner's rainbow was School. 

Behaviorism's main psychological rival in 1957 was psychoanalysis, but this rival had 
lost momentum by the time big government checks were available to buy psychological 
services. There were many demerits against psychoanalysis: its primitive narrative 
theory, besides sounding weird, had a desperate time proving anything statistically. Its 
basic technique required simple data to be elaborated beyond the bounds of credibility. 
Even where that was tolerable, it was useless in a modern school setting built around a 
simulacrum of precision in labeling. 

Social learning theorists, many academic psychiatrists, anthropologists, or other 
specialists identified with a university or famous institution like the Mayo Clinic, were 
behaviorism's closest cash competition. But behind the complex exterior webs they wove 
about social behavior, all were really behaviorists at heart. Though they spun theory in 
the mood of Rousseau, the payoff in each case came down to selling behavioral 
prescriptions to the policy classes. Their instincts might lead them into lyrical flights that 
could link rock falls in the Crab Nebula to the fall of sparrows in Monongahela, but the 
bread and butter argument was that mass populations could be and should be controlled 
by the proper use of carrots and sticks. 



Another respectable rival for the crown behaviorism found itself holding after WWII was 
stage theory, which could vary from the poetic grammar of Erik Eriksson to the 
impenetrable mathematical tapestry of Jean Piaget, an exercise in chutzpah weaving the 
psychological destiny of mankind out of the testimony of less than two dozen bourgeois 
Swiss kids. Modest academic empires could be erected on allegiance to one stage theory 
or another, but there were so many they tended to get in each other's way. Like seven- 
step programs to lose weight and keep it off, stage theory provided friendly alternatives 
to training children like rats — but the more it came into direct competition with the 
misleading precision of Skinnerian psychology, the sillier its clay feet looked. 

All stage theory is embarrassingly culture-bound. Talk about the attention span of kids 
and suddenly you are forced to confront the fact that while eighteen-month-old 
Americans become restless after thirty seconds, Chinese of that age can closely watch a 
demonstration for five minutes. And while eight-year-old New Yorkers can barely tie 
their shoes, eight-year-old Amish put in a full work day on the family homestead. Even in 
a population apparently homogenous, stage theory can neither predict nor prescribe for 
individual cases. Stage theories sound right for the same reason astrological predictions 
do, but the disconnect between ideal narratives and reality becomes all too clear when 
you try to act on them. 

When stage theory was entering its own golden age in the late 1960s, behaviorism was 
already entrenched as the psychology of choice. The federal government's BSTEP 
document and many similar initiatives to control teacher preparation had won the field 
for the stimulus-response business. So much money was pouring into psychological 
schooling from government/corporate sources, however, that rat psychologists couldn't 
absorb it all. A foot-in-the-door opportunity presented itself, which stage theorists 
scrambled to seize. 

The controlling metaphor of all scientific stage theories is not, like behaviorism's, that 
people are built like machinery, but that they grow like vegetables. Kinder requires 
garten, an easy sell to people sick of being treated like machinery. For all its seeming 
humanitarianism, stage theory is just another way to look beyond individuals to social 
class abstractions. If nobody possesses a singular spirit, then nobody has a sovereign 
personal destiny. Mother Teresa, Tolstoy, Hitler — they don't signify for stage theory, 
though from time to time they are asked to stand as representatives of types. 

Behaviorists