Word: walden
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...when it raises so many hackles and is so unlikely to pass the Faculty? Well, after some thinking, it becomes clear that what really attracts University Hall to 1-1-2 is its potential for social engineering. Finally Harvard can throw off its burdensome cloak of tradition and become Walden...
...system for the rebel. Yet the capacity to rebel is of the essence in a constructive society." Skinner was something of a rebel during his college career and still is--perhaps a reason for his never starting a community along the lines of the one in his novel, Walden Two. After developing an aversion to Hamilton College("I was not good at sports and suffered acutely as...better players bounced basketballs off my cranium..."), he openly began to revolt as best he could...
Yvonne Skinner, a robust and affable woman from her rhinestone-studded glasses to her brand-new blue sneakers, is the main reason, Skinner says, that he never started a Walden Two of his own. "I don't like the idea of Walden Two," she says, "I like my privacy, I like collecting stuff, I like to travel, And I like my home...
Unhappy with his teaching experience at the University of Minnesota during the summer of 1945, Skinner wrote Walden Two, "a venture in self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior represented by [the two main characters] Burris and Frazier. Now, of course, I'm a convinced Frazerian... Some of it was written with great emotion. The scene in Frazier's room, in which Frazier defends Walden Two while admitting that he himself is not a likeable person or fit for communal life.... I typed out in white heat...
Skinner's most important discovery while writing Walden Two is expressed through Frazier: "I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!' Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a bad prediction...What a strange discovery for a would-be dictator that the only effective methods of control are positively reinforcing...