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
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
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