by Brian Dear
November 11, 1953, Armistice Day around the nation, happened to also be Father’s Day at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shady Hill was a private school nestled in a leafy suburb just past a big bend in the Charles River about a mile west of Harvard University. Among the Harvard professors who sent their children to the school was the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, whose two daughters, Deborah and Julie, attended. On this particular day, fathers had been invited to come to the school, spend time in their children’s classes, and observe the lessons. Skinner sat in on his daughter Deborah’s fourth-grade arithmetic class and watched how Miss Eliot taught the children.
He could not believe what he saw.
Decades later, Skinner could still recall Eliot’s scuffing her shoe to correct a child’s posture, with his own dramatic shoe-scuffing demonstration. But something else he saw hit him much harder that day, making an impact that would change not only his own life, but the lives of people all over the world.
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Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. He attended the town’s small public school for twelve years. As a teenager he wrote for the local paper, and when he went off to Hamilton College he majored in English with dreams of becoming a novelist. After graduating, writer’s block made the novelist’s life look less promising. He spent time working in a New York bookstore, where he came across books by the psychologists John Broadus Watson and Ivan Pavlov, introducing him to something called “behaviorism.”
B. F. Skinner in 1960 Credit 2
Behaviorism arose as a movement in psychology shortly before the outbreak of World War I, largely due to the work of Watson at the University of Chicago. Watson wanted psychology to be taken seriously as one of the “hard” sciences, based on facts—observable, verifiable, repeatable phenomena seen and recorded through experimentation. To Watson, any study of psychology that dealt with notions like “feelings” and “consciousness” had no place in science. The historian Edna Heidbreder once described Watson’s rigid views this way: “Consciousness is only another name for the soul of theology, and the attempts of the older psychology to make it seem anything else are utterly futile. To admit the mental into science is to open the door to the enemies of science—to subjectivism, supernaturalism, and tender-mindedness generally. With the simplicity and finality of the Last Judgment, behaviorism divides the sheep from the goats. On the right hand side are behaviorism and science and all its works; on the left are souls and superstition and a mistaken tradition; and the line of demarcation is clear and unmistakable.”
By 1924, Skinner had given up becoming a novelist and, fascinated with behaviorism, enrolled in the psychology graduate program at Harvard headed by William Crozier, who became a mentor, shaping his view that the best way to understand an organism, even a human, was by understanding its behavior. Observable behavior was the key. No need to check under the hood—no need to guess what’s going on in the brain—rather, just observe and undertake an experimental analysis of the organism’s external behavior. Over the coming decades, Skinner would become the father of “operant behaviorism,” the school of thought that posits that all animals, including humans, are influenced by the consequences of their own behavior. Whenever a given animal acts, Skinner would argue, it follows that it experiences the consequences of its act. Skinner believed that the nature of those consequences could reliably determine how an animal will act in the future.
Skinner eventually joined the Harvard faculty and became one of the most famous, and certainly one of the most controversial, experimental psychologists of the twentieth century. He called himself a “radical behaviorist.” Much of Skinner’s early experimental research centered on analyzing the behavior of rats and pigeons. His Operant Conditioning Chamber, known widely as the “Skinner Box,” was a device in which he placed an animal, often a rat, which after wandering around in the box would eventually bump into or otherwise cause a lever to be pressed, an action that released a pellet of food for the rat to eat. The next time the rat hit the lever, the same thing happened. Pretty soon, the rat figured out how to get the food: press the lever. Over time Skinner would “schedule” the delivery of the food: it might be immediately upon hitting the lever, or it might be only after the rat hit the lever several times. The delivery of food served, in his view, as a reinforcement designed to encourage a repeat of the lever-pressing behavior. Each time the rat pressed the lever the desired number of times, another pellet dropped into the box, thus reinforcing the consequences of the rat’s behavior. No surprise: rats caught on quickly, and the pellets flowed. The Skinner Box owed much to a predecessor device called the “Puzzle Box,” built by the Columbia University psychologist Edward L. Thorndike. In the Puzzle Box, a cat discovered a piece of salmon that was just out of its reach. Only by accidentally hitting a lever that opened a door on the side of the box was the cat able to get to the food. Over time, the cat, like Skinner’s rat later on, learned to skip struggling to reach for the food and instead go for the lever. Thorndike called this “the law of effect,” wherein an organism increases over time the frequency of a behavior that yields satisfactory outcomes arising from that behavior, and reduces over time the frequency of behaviors yielding unsatisfactory outcomes.
Another Skinner creation, which he initially called a “baby tender” and later dubbed the “Air Crib,” was introduced to mainstream America in a sensational article he had submitted to Ladies’ Home Journal in 1945. The editors renamed Skinner’s original title for the article with the more provocative “Baby in a Box,” and published it in the October issue. The article featured a jarring full-page picture that at first glance a reader might think showed a year-old baby girl trapped inside a glass box, holding her hands up to the glass while she looked out at the world.
“When we decided to have another child,” Skinner wrote, “my wife and I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery. We began by going over the disheartening schedule of the young mother, step by step. We asked only one question: Is this practice important for the physical and psychological health of the baby? When it was not, we marked it for elimination. Then the ‘gadgeteering’ began.”
The resulting “gadget” was a compartment, about the size of a conventional crib, closed on five sides with a pair of hinged doors made of safety glass in front, which the parents could open so their baby Deborah could be tended to. Heat and humidity were controlled automatically within the compartment (“We keep the temperature at 78 degrees, humidity 50. She is never too hot, or too cold, but just right”), and it was not necessary to use blankets or clothing on the baby other than a diaper. “The human species evolved in a tropical climate and certainly without the benefit of clothing,” Skinner wrote. Mother and father were pleased with the freedom of movement the baby enjoyed inside: “When awake, she exercises almost constantly and often with surprising violence. Her leg, stomach, and back muscles are especially active and have become strong and hard. It is necessary to watch this performance for only a few minutes to realize how severely constrained the average baby is, and how much energy must be diverted into the only remaining channel, crying.”
World War II was over, and while America was ready to enjoy the fruits of consumerism, it was not quite prepared to embrace the Air Crib, and only a few ever sold commercially. Over the years an urban legend spread that the Air Crib was simply a glorified Skinner Box, this time redesigned for experimenting on a human baby instead of a rat, and that Skinner’s daughter Deborah had suffered greatly under the hands of her mad-professor father, to the point, so the story goes, that she grew up to be psychotic and ultimately shot herself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. It was all a wild rumor and nothing but, possibly put out there to discredit behaviorism in general and Skinner’s name in particular. Many decades later, Deborah Skinner, very much alive, still finds she has to occasionally pen a letter to a newspaper editor, pointing out the bl
atant inaccuracy of the rumor and how healthy and normal her childhood actually was.
The same year that the Ladies’ Home Journal article appeared, the future Shady Hill schoolteacher Mary Eliot graduated from Vassar College. She’d heard about Skinner’s Air Crib, probably, she says, from that famous article. Only, she and her friends didn’t call it an Air Crib; they, like many people then, referred to it as “the box” or as the “Skinner Box,” with all of the rat-experiment connotations that that name brought with it. “We were fascinated that anybody would want to raise a child in a box,” Eliot recalls. “Of course, the child was very small at this time. But it seemed very strange to me.” So when, in 1953, Deborah Skinner, the actual Baby in the Box from the Ladies’ Home Journal article, entered the fourth grade at Shady Hill School, “I was very much interested to see what she was like,” says Eliot. “It turned out she was very much like most children. I didn’t see any great effects from being raised in a box.”
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When asked about his own childhood experience at the Susquehanna School, B. F. Skinner told this author, “I loved school! The first and second grades were in one room, the third and fourth were in another, the fifth and sixth in another, seventh and eighth in another, and the rest in high school. One teacher had charge of two classes. We learned a great deal, we were well disciplined; we sat in seats with desks built on them and so on, that kind of a thing, and we had outdoor toilets, big, you know, no plumbing, it was that kind of place. But I loved it, I tried to go there as early as I could in the day.” He viewed his teachers as generally excellent, and in the first volume of his autobiography, Particulars of My Life, he devoted many pages to his favorite, an English teacher, Miss Mary Graves. She was a “very important person in my life,” he explained. “She was someone who listened to me, answered my questions, and almost always had something interesting to say or a suggestion of something interesting to do.”
If his own schooling had been so idyllic, his desire each morning to race to school so palpable, his own teachers so wonderful, with one, Mary Graves, being a such profound influence on his entire life, why, beginning in the 1950s, did he think education and learning urgently needed improving? What triggered this desire to get in there and try to fix education?
“It was my daughters’ school that got me going,” he said.
As Miss Eliot walked up and down the aisles between the children’s desks in his daughter’s fourth-grade Shady Hill arithmetic class that November day in 1953, something else besides the screech of Miss Eliot’s shoe against that hardwood floor had caught Skinner’s eyes and ears. He noticed that some students finished their math problems early and then sat there with nothing to do; others lagged until the end of the period, at which time she collected the papers, which—one hoped—she would grade that night and return the next day.
“I suddenly realized,” Skinner would cry out years later, reliving that Shady Hill moment with a slap of his hand against his formidable forehead, “God! This violates everything we know about the learning process.”
Whether Eliot knew it or not, Skinner felt, she was breaking not one but two sacred rules, rules this staunch behaviorist believed were bedrock-foundational principles of learning: Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback. If those two principles were not practiced in a classroom setting, the teacher was impeding learning, plain and simple. “The students,” Skinner felt, “were not being told at once whether their work was right or wrong.” A paper, quiz, or exam marked up with corrections and a grade, but not seen by a student until some twenty-four hours later (or longer), could not possibly act as effective reinforcement. Furthermore, “they were all moving at the same pace regardless of preparation or ability.” If it takes Johnny ten minutes to get through some math problems that Sally whips through in five, why should Sally then have to wait around for Johnny to catch up? And yet that is what Skinner saw: “A few students soon finished and were impatiently idle. Others, with growing frustration, strained.”
Skinner hadn’t invented those two principles, Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback, but he was fully invested in them. Others had developed the concepts years earlier, starting with the early behaviorists in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then, in the 1920s, an Ohio State University professor of psychology named Sidney L. Pressey took the ideas a step further by building a series of “automatic teacher” devices to test his theories. One of his machines issued a piece of candy whenever a student got the right answer. The results of the research made a believer out of Pressey. He observed that when teachers grade student papers but fail to return them to students until some later time, much of the potential impact on the learning that was supposed to be taking place is lost. For behaviorists, this slow-poke grading approach epitomized one of the weaknesses of education, a way that seemed designed to be as bureaucratically—not to mention behaviorally—inefficient as possible. “When an examination is corrected and returned after a delay of many hours or days,” Pressey wrote, “the student’s behavior is not appreciably modified.” In behaviorist terms, if the organism had no way of determining what the consequences of its behavior were, right away, then it was unlikely one could predict how the organism would act later as a result of that previous behavior. This would not do.
He not only published papers and presented his findings at conferences, but also attempted to build and sell automatic teaching and testing devices in the hopes that they would receive widespread adoption in schools. Maybe he might strike it rich along the way. Unfortunately, he went a little overboard, as true-believer technology start-up founders often do. Seeing great potential in his products, he “worked himself sick,” says one historian, “to contrive and commercialize machines, remedial materials, and tests.” The timing of Pressey’s attempts at commercializing his machines couldn’t have been worse. He introduced his most advanced device right around the time of the catastrophic 1929 stock market crash and the dawn of the Great Depression. Pressey’s ideas failed to catch on, the nation’s priorities shifted, and for several decades not much happened. In the 1940s, he attempted to rekindle interest in his work, publishing and presenting a few more times, but it wasn’t until Skinner saw what was going on in his daughter’s arithmetic class in 1953 that things started to heat up again, rekindling behaviorist interest in the two principles to the point that they would quickly begin to propagate throughout Skinner’s thinking and his published work—and, soon, throughout the thinking and the work of many others.
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Later the very same day Skinner had sat in on his daughter’s fourth-grade class, he went to work wondering about what he could do to facilitate more effective learning. Was there a way for a teacher to successfully educate an entire class of students while not violating those two fundamental learning principles? Could a teacher, Miss Eliot or any teacher for that matter, teach a class, all the while providing Immediate Feedback and Self-Pacing at appropriate levels for each individual student? Somewhere around this point Skinner made the same leap that Pressey had made all those years before. Maybe this was the wrong question to ask. Maybe the right question to ask was, forget the teacher for a moment—was there simply a better way for a child to learn?
It did not seem humanly possible for Miss Eliot or any other teacher to teach a class of kids and do so while providing Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback. How could one teacher provide the proper reinforcement, as Skinner would have termed it, at just the right time for each of the twenty students, without boring the other students, so they were all effectively learning at their own pace? Perhaps if there was a way to make twenty clones of Miss Eliot, or hire enough teachers at the school so there was always a 1:1 student-teacher ratio…but neither of those scenarios was realistic then, and they’re still unrealistic today.
But perhaps there was a way to solve this conundrum. Especially if the focus were more on helping the child learn, and less on helping the teacher teach. He realized from his own laboratory work that the answer was “i
nstrumentation,” which for Skinner meant more “gadgeteering.” If you can’t clone the teacher, then why not turn the teacher into a machine, and clone the machine. A machine, some sort of an apparatus—Skinner would have to figure out what exactly—that not only helped students learn but actually taught. For Skinner the question was quickly evolving to one like this: perhaps if the twenty boys and girls seated in their little chairs in front of their little desks each had little machines on top of those little desks, and each child was interacting, at their own comfortable pace, privately with their own little machine, with Miss Eliot strolling up and down the aisles of the classroom to mind the children’s progress and stop here and there to help when and as needed, we might get somewhere?
For days Skinner gadgeteered, trying to think this machine through. His Harvard colleagues reacted with confusion as he sliced manila folders into pieces using scissors, then took the pieces to create a crude box. Not a box for rats this time, not for babies, but a box for teaching, to help students learn. He then built a sturdier version of the box out of plywood pieces. It was his first “teaching machine” and required no power, operated by manually moving a simple slider mechanism. While it was primitive, it was a start of something that moved closer to his ideals of offering learners Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback.
Teaching machines became Skinner’s new passion, almost an obsession. Over the next few months, he improved the machine’s design and ruggedness, and in March 1954 he packed up the latest version and took it to a psychology conference at the University of Pittsburgh, where he demonstrated it publicly for the first time. He submitted a conference paper, “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching,” that accompanied his demonstration. It caused a sensation.