When I was originally asked to do this project, the example topic given was “Freud”. As a psychology major, I jokingly stated “But I could write three hundred words on Freud without going to the library”. It is because of this egregious mistake that I have chosen to instead write about someone else. Someone as wildly different and estranged as possible from him: Skinner.
In laymens terms, yes, Skinner and Freud were both psychologists. They were both men, they both participated in formal academia, and this is where their similarities end. Whereas Freud definitely helped inspire other psychologists, Skinner was one of the people that put his theories to practical use.
In most psychology courses and internet searches, Skinner’s work is simple enough. He was a behaviorist, he patented the “Skinner box”, a small box used to gauge the behavior of small animals. What’s more, he did all of this without ever mentioning children. However, since I am still learning about Skinner in my gen-ed psychology course, I chose to cover something that it did not: His life outside of the Skinner box.
There are quite a few books, both biographic and autobiographic, regarding Skinner’s life. The two that I chose to reference were “B.F. Skinner: A life” by Daniel W., and “The shaping of a Behaviorist”, by B.F. Skinner himself. I won’t bore you with the details, because the details frankly were boring. Skinner attended Harvard, though his career did not start out as glorious as it was at it’s peak, it’s end, or in memorandum. He was immediately greeted with a housing issue, and as he went to school before the second world war, things weren’t nearly as advanced as they were not. He regales how due to circumstance, the only room available to him was a single (With others all being doubles) carved from the remains of what was once a walk-in closet. Due to the nature of this dormitory, he specified that there was to be one toilet among a discouraging number of occupants, something he didn’t quite expect from attending Harvard.
My articles I reference, “Teaching machines” by B.F. Skinner, and “A new approach to teaching Intermediary Mathematics” by Karl Menger focus on a different part of his life. His studies in rudimentary behavior in animals were impactful, however the impact that those studies had was in the world of teaching. Skinner had many theories and discussions on the implication of behaviorism in teaching, and theorized in how behaviors in students could be changed in a learning environment.