In The Technology of Teaching, B. F. Skinner at times sounds quite traditional. “A culture,” he tells us, “is no stronger than its capacity to transmit itself. It must impart an accumulation of skills, knowledge, and social and ethical practices to its new members.” This task falls to educational institutions. Could Skinner, a radical behaviorist, be sympathetic to “saving Western civilization one student at a time”?
Our concern in this article is not intellectual history. We turn to Skinner because his theory makes explicit what remains implicit in real classroom practices. This is not to say that teachers read Skinner and set out to put behaviorist theory into practice. But teachers can regard the right set of behaviors as adequate for an education: giving the correct answer on a prealgebra quiz, recalling the plotlines from Huckleberry Finn, or correctly identifying a painting’s title and year. Such an approach is functionally, if unconsciously, behaviorist. But education can be a deeper inculturation, a formation of the soul; and it is this sort of education that advances civilization.
What does Skinner mean by “culture,” or even “transmission”? Can someone who thinks the “self is simply a system for representing a functionally unified system of responses” possibly be on the side of Western civilization?
Skinner makes these remarks while arguing that “it is quite impossible for the student to discover for himself any substantial part of the wisdom of his culture ….” But if culture is the acquired habit of cultivating wonder and joy, its transmission must involve discovery.
The broader context is Skinner’s rejection of what he calls “mentalism” and of the inner dimension of the person:
The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer’s own body…. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. When what a person does [is] attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation?1
Skinner’s notion of education contrasts with St. Thomas Aquinas’ insistence that teaching is guided discovery:
one person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to that other the reasoning process which he himself goes through by his own natural reason. And thus, through the instrumentality, as it were, of what is told him, the natural reason of the pupil arrives at a knowledge of the things which he did not know.
For St. Thomas, learning is discovery. Unlike the original discoverer, however, the student has the benefit of an experienced guide. Good teachers attend to the inward path, progress along which is only indirectly evident through testing. Student often get the right answer without really getting it.
If discovery means learning without guidance, Skinner is plainly right that “it is quite impossible for the student to discover for himself any substantial part of the wisdom of his culture.”2 But the student must nevertheless retrace the path of discovery. All learning begins in perplexity and proceeds through inquiry toward a moment of discovery.
Classical education centers on the individual’s recapitulation of cultural development. Students recapitulate within themselves humanity’s great intellectual, political, aesthetic, and religious achievements. Skinner conceives cultural “transmission” primarily as the replication of observable behavior rather than the formation of the student’s inner life. In a previous article, we examined the intellectual dimension of this process. This article turns to affective formation through poetry and art.
Once More with Feeling
Consider the difference between memorizing a random string of numbers and performing a poem. A contestant in a memory competition may be able to recall thousands of random digits:
5528925010759075577293270484667275774733…
In 2018, Zhang Ying memorized 3,260 random digits in an hour.3 Remarkable as it is, this feat of recall depends largely on practice and technique.
On the other hand, consider reciting Macaulay’s narrative poem “Horatius at the Bridge,” a performance that takes more than half an hour.
Memorizing random digits and reciting “Horatius” are both impressive feats of memory, but they differ sharply in nature and purpose. One is the dispassionate application of a mnemonic method, such as the major system. The other calls forth feelings of patriotism, admiration for bravery, and the terror and elation of war. To be sure, one could mechanically repeat the words of “Horatius at the Bridge” as one repeats a series of meaningless integers. But can a merely mechanical recitation do justice to the poem’s final lines?
With weeping and with laughter still is the story told, How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old.
Reciting a poem is not merely an act of recall but a performance. Exceptional performances embody meaning, going far beyond the ability to simply recall words or notes. Consider, for example, Damian Lewis’s Antony, Fauzia’s Für Elise, or any favorite performance that comes to mind.
The appreciation of “Horatius” has a personal dimension. Unless one connects the poem with one’s own fears and courageous stands, its words remain little more than dictionary definitions and thin associations. Only through this inward, personal connection can one approach the poem’s fuller meaning.
The transmission of culture does require appreciating the past. But it also requires embodying the best of that past in order to foster a better future. The cultural ideal embodied by Horatius is not transmitted unless it inspires braver action. One might recite “Horatius” yet lapse into the passive expectancy portrayed in Philip Larkin’s “Next, Please”:
Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say
Then hopes pass by like ships headed for other ports, until the “black-sailed unfamiliar” docks.
Manichean Hearts
The contrast between “professing with one’s mouth” and “believing in one’s heart” highlights the inner dimension of cultural transmission. Culture is not a series of checkboxes on a multiple-choice exam. Genuine cultural transmission transforms facile assent into earnest understanding and indifference into genuine desire. Consider St. Augustine’s powerful rejection of the Manichean heresy. The Manicheans held that there were two ultimate principles, good and evil, and associated earthly, bodily, and sexual existence with evil. How does one transmit a culture that celebrates the material world as both created by God and intrinsically good? Transmitting such a culture requires more than affirming that the material world is good; it requires appreciating—even celebrating—embodied existence.
Michelangelo’s David is particularly effective at rooting out the Manicheanism one may reject with the mouth yet harbor in the heart. The viewer encounters the human form not as an ethereal image but as a solid, physical presence. Its frank naturalism stands in opposition to the dualism between matter and spirit.
Rainer Maria Rilke described the inward transformation necessary for poetry, but his point applies to the other arts as well.
The memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
To transmit a culture is to transform not only the mind but also the heart. Unlike Skinner’s vision of cultural transmission as memorization, genuine transmission reaches “into the blood,” shaping one’s hopes and dreams, affections and habits. It unites memory with understanding, thought with feeling, and recitation with action, standing on the past to change the future.
- Skinner, B. F. 1974. “Causes of Behavior.” Pp. 16–18 in About Behaviorism↩︎
- Skinner, The Technology of Teaching.↩︎
- The scoring system permits some errors but imposes a significant penalty for missed digits.↩︎
The photograph of the statue of David by Michelangelo was taken by Jörg Bittner Unna and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
