gat

market researchers, hustlers of white bread, bankers, stock salesmen, makers of extruded plastic
knick-knacks, sugar brokers, and, of course, to men on horseback and heads of state. A short time
after I began as a behaviorist, I quit, having seen enough of the ragged Eichmannesque crew at
Columbia drawn like iron filings to this magnetic program which promised to simplify all the
confusion of life into underlying schemes of reinforcement.
Plasticity
The worm lives in our initial conception of human nature. Are human beings to be trusted? With
what reservations? To what degree? The official answer has lately been "not much," at least since
the end of WWII. Christopher Lasch was able to locate some form of surveillance, apprehension,
confinement, or other security procedure at the bottom of more than a fifth of the jobs in the
United States. Presumably that’s because we don’t trust each other. Where could that mistrust
have been learned?
As we measure each other, we select a course to follow. A curriculum is a racecourse. How we
lay it out is contingent on assumptions we make about the horses and spectators. So it is with
school. Are children empty vessels? What do you think? I suspect not many parents look at their
offspring as empty vessels because contradictory evidence accumulates from birth, but the whole
weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty, or so
plastic it’s the same thing.
The commodification of childhood—making it a product which can be sold—demands a
psychological frame in which kids can be molded. A handful of philosophers dominates modern
thinking because they argue this idea, and in arguing it they open up possibilities to guide history
to a conclusion in some perfected society. Are children empty? John Locke said they were in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters,
without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast
store...? To this I answer in one word, from Experience; in that all our
knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.
Are there no innate ideas? Does the mind lack capacities and powers of its own, being etched
exclusively by sensory inputs? Locke apparently thought so, with only a few disclaimers so wispy
they were abandoned by his standard bearers almost at once. Are minds blank like white paper,
capable of accepting writing from whoever possesses the ink? Empty like a gas tank or a sugar
bowl to be filled by anyone who can locate the filler-hole? Was John Watson right when he said in
1930:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to
bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to
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