Word: skinnerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This awareness that he is unfit for communal life may be one reason that Skinner has never tried to start a real Walden Two, never sent a Dear-President-Mittelbach telegram to the president of Harvard. In addition, he likes his own kind of life too well to give it up even for an ideal in which he believes so intensely, and even if he felt otherwise, his wife is opposed to the idea...
Says Yvonne Skinner, a former University of Chicago English major who studied with Thornton Wilder and is herself a gifted writer: "We had tremendous arguments about Walden Two. I wouldn't like it; I just like change and privacy...
Fred and Yvonne Skinner live in an attractive, modern Cambridge house complete with swimming pool, a stereo system, a grand piano, a clavichord and, in the basement study, a small organ. In a sense, Skinner's own life-style is highly controlled and conditioned. His study contains a special clock that "runs when I'm really thinking. I keep a cumulative record of serious time at my desk. The clock starts when I turn on the desk light, and whenever it passes twelve hours, I plot a point on a curve. I can see what my average rate of writing...
...reading and engaging in serious discussions. The smell of farm-fresh cooking is everywhere. The resemblance to Walden Two is more than superficial. Twin Oaks, a 123-acre farm commune nestled in the foothills of Virginia's Piedmont, is a remarkable attempt to create a Utopian community governed by Skinner's laws of social engineering...
Especially life at Twin Oaks. The favorite sports are "cooperation volleyball" and skinny-dipping in the South Anna River?false modesty is another of the sins that are not reinforced?and there is plenty of folk singing and dancing. In a departure from Skinner's rather puritanical Walden Two, sex is considered, as one member put it, a "pleasant pastime, like anything else." Adds Kat: "We don't have a very high opinion of marriage?it often becomes possessive. We do have a high regard for what Skinner calls 'abiding affection...