Word: skinners
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Unlike Burris, the numerous and articulate anti-Skinnerians remain skeptical, if not downright hostile toward him and his followers. Yet they feel that his long, patient campaign against freedom must be studied and understood. Their criticism is directed not at Skinner the scientific technician (the soundness of his laboratory work is seldom questioned) but at Skinner the philosopher and political thinker; his proposal for a controlled society, they say, is both unworkable and evil...
Giving as an example the failure of the North Koreans to brainwash many of their G.I. war prisoners, Stanford Psychologist Albert Bandura asserts that control of human behavior on the scale advocated by Skinner is impossible. Psychologist Ernest Hilgard, also of Stanford, thinks control of mass behavior is theoretically possible but realistically improbable, because there are too many bright people who would never go along...
...Skinner himself admits that "pigeons aren't people," but points out that his ideas have already been put to practical use in schools, mental hospitals, penal institutions and business firms. Skinner-inspired teaching machines have begun to produce what amounts to an educational revolution. It was after a visit to his daughter's fourth-grade arithmetic class that he invented the first device for programmed instruction in 1954. Having seen "minds being destroyed," he concluded that youngsters should learn math, spelling and other subjects in the same way that pigeons learn Ping Pong. Accordingly, machines now in use in scores...
Some critics, loyal Skinnerians among them, argue that this teaching process bores all but the dullest students, and that there is little solid evidence as to how well programmed instruction sticks. But Skinner insists that his devices teach faster than other methods and free teachers to give personal attention to students who are trying to master complex subjects...
...some mental hospitals, reinforcement therapy inspired by Skinner is helping apathetic or rebellious patients to behave more like healthy human beings. The staffers of one institution, for instance, were troubled by patients who insisted on trailing into the dining room long after the dinner bell sounded. Attendants tried closing the doors 20 minutes after the bell rang, refusing admittance to those who showed up any later. Gradually, the interval between bell and door closing was shortened to only five minutes, and most patients were arriving promptly. "You shift from one kind of reinforcement?annoying the guards and getting attention?...