Extracts:" Walden Two", B F. Skinner

What distressed me was the clear evidence that my teaching had missed the mark. I could understand why young and irresponsible spirits might forget much of what I had taught them, but I could never reconcile myself to the uncanny precision with which they recalled unimportant details. My visitors, returning at commencement time, would gape with ignorance when I alluded to a field that we had once explored together - or so I thought - but they would gleefully remind me, word for word, of my smart reply to some question from the class or the impromptu digression with which I had once filled out a miscalculated hour. I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of the science of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.
"We solve the problem of the lecturer by dispensing with him. The lecture is a most inefficient method of diffusing culture. it became obsolete with the invention of printing. It survives only in our universities and their lay imitators, and a few other backward institutions." He glared at Castle. "Why don't you just hand printed lectures to your students? Yes, I know. Because they won't read them. A fine institution it is that must solve that problem with platform chicanery!"
I was quite pleased with myself. In the short space of five or ten minutes I had overcome a stubborn barrier between myself and this attractive young lady. She was no longer in awe of the professor. Not that we would now speak the same language - God forbid that anyone else should speak the bastard tongue of the academy with which I was damned - but we were no longer on different personal levels.
"Some day it may be possible - we shall have controls to satisfy the most academic statistician. And by that time they may be necessary, too, for we shall have reached the point of dealing with very subtle differences. At present they aren't necessary. To go to all the trouble of running controls would be to make a fetish of scientific method. Even in the exact sciences we frequently don't ask for controls. If I touch a match to a mixture of chemicals and an explosion occurs, I don't set a second mixture aside to see if it will blow up without the help of the match. The effect of the match is obvious."
"The mixture might have been on the point of blowing up just as you applied the match," I said, with a caution born of academic carping.
"That was a good set of papers," he said suddenly, almost smacking his lips. "Some quite interesting ideas. I sense a gradual improvement in the quality of our students as the years go by. They come closer and closer to my expectations. Have you noticed it?"
"All I know is, I've come to expect less and less."
I picked up the paper. The president of my university had been in the city, making his most recent version of a standard speech. The article was rewritten from a press release and badly handled, but it would have been difficult to do serious damage to so distinguished an assemblage of clichés. The theme was the "Task of Education in the Postwar World," and phrases like "encouraging individual initiative," "ministering to the whole man," "stimulating a spirit of inquiry," "fostering an open mind," and "restoring the dignity of the human soul," were packed tightly together. As usual, I was not sure what any of these utterances meant, though I experienced a nebulous sense of agreement. Insofar as they had meaning at all, they seemed to refer to worth-while goals. But on one point my reaction was definite: it was obvious that no one, least of all the speaker, had any notion of how to set to work to attain them.
Heresy Index          November 5, 2004