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Chapter 13
The Empty Child
Walden Two (1948) B.F. Skinner. This utopist is a psychologist, inventor of
a mechanical baby-tender, presently engaged on experiments testing the habit
capacities of pigeons. Halfway through this contemporary utopia, the reader
may feel sure, as we did, that this is a beautifully ironic satire on what has been
called "behavioral engineering".... Of all the dictatorships espoused by utopists,
this is the most profound....The citizen of this ideal society is placed during his
first year in a sterile cubicle, wherein the onditioning begins.... In conclusion,
the perpetrator of this "modern" utopia looks down from a nearby hill of the
community which is his handiwork and proclaims: "I like to play God!"
— Negley and Patrick, The Quest For Utopia
Miss Skinner Sleeps Scientifically
At the university people used to call Kings College before the American Revolution, I lived for a
time under a psychological regime called behaviorism in the last golden moments before Mind
Science took over American schooling. At Columbia, I was in on the transformation without ever
knowing it. By the time it happened, I had shape-shifted into a schoolteacher, assigned to spend
my adult life as a technician in the human rat cage we call public education.
Although I may flatter myself, for one brief instant I think I was the summer favorite of Dr. Fred
S. Keller at Columbia, a leading behaviorist of the late 1950s whose own college textbook was
dedicated to his mentor, B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists from Harvard. Skinner
was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container with a window, much like keeping
a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat mis-described in the famous article "Baby in a Box,"
(Ladies Home Journal, September 28, 1945).
Italian parents giving their own children a glass of wine in those days might have ended up in jail
and their children in foster care, but what Skinner did was perfectly legal. For all I know, it still is.
What happened to Miss Skinner? Apparently she was eventually sent to a famous progressive
school the very opposite of a rat-conditioning cage, and grew up to be an artist.
Speaking of boxes, Skinner commanded boxes of legal tender lecturing and consulting with
business executives on the secrets of mass behavior he had presumably learned by watching
trapped rats. From a marketing standpoint, the hardest task the rising field of behavioral
psychology had in peddling its wares was masking its basic stimulus-response message (albeit one
with a tiny twist) in enough different ways to justify calling behaviorism "a school." Fat
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