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He was rewarded in a different way—his first general public recognition—when in 1945 the Ladies' Home Journal printed a piece about another kind of Skinner box, the so-called air crib (see box, page 51). By the time the Journal article was printed, Skinner had finished writing his second book, though he did not find a publisher for it until 1948. The work was Waiden Two, completed in seven weeks of impassioned creativity. Writing it, says Skinner, was "pretty obviously a venture in self-therapy in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior, represented by Burris and Frazier." Even today, both characters represent Skinner himself. Burris is a professor with traditional ideas, acquired in childhood, about freedom, dignity and democracy. Frazier is the antidemocratic creator of a controlled society whose views about human behavior correspond to Skinner's laboratory findings.
Visiting Frazier's planned community, Burris is both attracted and repelled—attracted by the seeming contentment of its inhabitants, repelled by their voluntary submission to the maneuverings. however well-intentioned, of its Planners and Managers. In the end, his skepticism overcome, he decides to join the community and with "euphoric abandon" wires his college head: "My dear President Mittelbach, you may take your stupid university . . ."
Pigeons Aren't People
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 of cities across the country present pupils with a succession of easy learning steps. At each one, a correct answer to a question brings instant reinforcement, not with the grain of corn that rewarded the pigeon, but with a printed statement—supposedly just as satisfying—that the answer is right.
Juvenile Offenders