gat

few have any work worth doing. Only the logic of machinery and systems protects your girl and
boy when you send them off to behavioral laboratories on the yellow behaviorist bus. Should
systems care? They aren’t Mom and Dad, you know.
8 While fact-checking the book in March 2003, I had occasion to contact Professor Matthews in Australia, who had
no memory of ever using bananas in his scholarly prose! Fortunately, he found the reference in his works several
days later and was gracious enough to contact me, or this lovely critique of psychobabble would have been lost to
the Underground History.
Programming The Empty Child
To get an act of faith this unlikely off the ground there had to be some more potent vision than
Skinner could provide, some evidence more compelling than reinforcement schedule data to
inspire men of affairs to back the project. There had to be foundational visions for the scientific
quest. One will have to stand for all, and the one I’ve selected for examination is among the most
horrifyingly influential books ever to issue from a human pen, a rival in every way to Frederick
Taylor’s Scientific Management. The author was Jean Jacques Rousseau. The book, Emile,
published in 1762. Whether Rousseau had given his own five children away to the foundling home
before or after he wrote it, I can’t say for sure. Before, I’m told.
Emile is a detailed account of the total transformation of a boy of ten under the precisely
calculated behavioral ministrations of a psychological schoolmaster. Rousseau showed the world
how to write on the empty child Locke had fathered; he supplied means by which Locke’s potent
image could be converted to methodology. It took only a quarter century for Germans to catch on
to the pick-and-shovel utility of dreamy Rousseau, only a little longer for Americans and English
to do the same. Once Rousseau was fully digested, the temptation to see society’s children as
human resources proved irresistible to those nations which had gone furthest in developing the
mineral resource, coal, and its useful spirits, heat and steam.
Rousseau’s influence over pedagogy began when empty child explanations of human nature came
to dominate. With emotional religion, village life, local elites, and American tradition reeling from
hammer blows of mass immigration, the nation was broadly transformed at the beginning of the
twentieth century without much conscious public awareness of what was happening.
One blueprint for the great transformation was Emile, an attempt to reestablish Eden using a
procedure Rousseau called "negative education." Before the book gets to protagonist Emile, we
are treated to this instructive vignette of an anonymous student:
The poor child lets himself be taken away, he turned to look backward with
regret, fell silent, and departed, his eyes swollen with tears he dared not shed
and his heavy heart with the sigh he dared not exhale.
Table of Contents
Page 308