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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment