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The Skinner Box With Icons

April 24, 2025 2 Comments

I am not a deep thinker. I’m more of a deep drinker. My education is scattershot. I often boil concepts down to thumbnail sketches and run with them. Take childhood development. Yeah. Take my childhood development, please, as Rodney used to say.

Ugh. Forget about me. I meant normal people. I’ve boiled down the process of raising anklebiters to two interesting takes on the subject: Jean Piaget and B.F. Skinner. They’re more or less opposite poles on the child-rearing compass.

Both guys had some complicated ideas behind their snot-wiping advice. I’m a simpleton, so I’ll oversimplify it so even I can understand it: Piaget thought children developed mostly internally, if you encouraged them a little, and Skinner thought they developed mostly from external factors, like whacks on the knuckles or candy, depending on what kind of mischief they were getting up to.

I ate lunch with Skinner way back when. He asked me altogether too many questions about how I ended up the way I was. I figured eventually he was going to stuff me in a box and feed me corn kernels only if I pressed the correct button, so I stopped eating lunch at his house pretty quick.

I’m sort of interested in Piaget’s thang, though. His ideas about child development seem to align with my own ill-considered opinions here and there. His ideas about how very small children proceed through a series of stages seems pretty believable. These preliminary stages are cognitive egocentrism, anthropomorphism, finalism, and animism. These stages happen between the ages of 2 and 7, more or less. They’re called the pre-operational phase. You’re not yet ready to begin thinking concretely and logically until you go through these steps.

1. Cognitive Egocentrism

In Piaget’s theory, egocentrism refers to the inability of young children to see things from perspectives other than their own. This means they believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.

It highlights that young children can’t fully grasp that others have their own thoughts, perspectives, or knowledge.

2. Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is when children attribute human characteristics or emotions to non-human things (animals, objects, or even forces of nature).

Piaget saw this as a way for children to make sense of the world. Since they can’t fully differentiate between human and non-human behaviors at this stage, they project human traits onto everything around them.

3. Finalism

Finalism refers to the child’s belief in the idea that things happen for a purpose or that everything has an ultimate end or goal, even if it might not make logical sense.

Children in the preoperational stage often struggle to understand cause and effect in the logical, scientific way adults do. They tend to think more in terms of intentions or purposes behind events, even if those events don’t have clear goals.

4. Animism

Animism is the belief that inanimate objects or natural phenomena have a life-like quality, or even a soul.

Animism reflects a developmental stage where children can’t fully separate the properties of living things from non-living things. It’s another sign of their egocentrism and their tendency to humanize the world around them.

I got to thinking about all this because I’ve been watching women clutching smartphones like they were heart-lung machines, while acting like preadolescents, and I’m trying to make sense of their behavior. I see it out and about in my own life, but I also went down one of those YorubaTube ratholes that had loads of women being arrested and thrown out of airports and wrecking fast food restaurants and similar hijinks.

I didn’t associate these behaviors with Piaget right away, but the chronically addicted social-media-loving smartphone clutchers all seemed to have the same worldview to me: solipsism, anthropomorphism, scapegoating, and paganism. I realized I was just renaming Piaget’s four stages of preadolescent development. I had to go back and look it up, and torture it a bit (thanks, B.F.!) to get it to fit, but it’s pretty close.

You have to remember that for a toddler dealing with the world using Cognitive Egocentrism, the little bastard is just doing the best they can. They’re not yet capable of moving on to more nuanced views of the world and the people in it. Solipsism is an adult-ish version of this worldview. You’re technically capable of understanding other people’s ideas and motivations, you just don’t give a shiny shite about anyone but yourself.

Anthropomorphism is plenty easy to spot. I’m regularly informed that so-and-so’s daughter has acquired a “grand-dog.” This animal was “adopted,” of course. And “rescued,” natch. Grandma now buys it Christmas presents and bakes birthday cakes for it, and babysits it. “My computer totally hates me” is a different but easily recognizable signpost on the anthropomorphic highway. And by the way, you should totally argue with that bitch in the GPS while you’re zooming down the anthropomorphic highway.

Scapegoating is pretty close to Finalism. It’s a question of degree, I guess. Children wonder what motive force is behind everything, because they don’t know how the world works. Adults assumes there’s a motive force behind everything, and they know damn well who it is. He’s in their social media feed with a Hitler mustache photoshopped in.

Animism is just paganism without portfolio. By the way, did you buy an Earth Day present for your grand-dog?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the average American woman has a smartphone slapped into their hand more or less exactly when they’re reaching the end of their pre-operational phase. The phone, and all the stuff it shotguns into her synapses, ensures that she never progresses any further. The development of iPhone Barbie is seven years of Piaget followed by the rest of their life subjected to B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, courtesy of Steve Jobs’ festering corpse.

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which behavior is shaped by its consequences. Developed by B.F. Skinner, it focuses on how actions are influenced by rewards (reinforcements) or punishments.

Reinforcement increases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:

Positive reinforcement: Adding something pleasant (like giving a treat).

Negative reinforcement: Removing something unpleasant (like turning off a loud noise).

Punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:

Positive punishment: Adding something unpleasant (like giving extra chores).

Negative punishment: Taking away something pleasant (like taking away screen time).

In operant conditioning, behaviors are learned through the consequences they produce, and these consequences can either strengthen or weaken the behavior over time. It’s used widely in both animal training and human behavior modification.

The woman in the video is completely calm, in an unreasonable sort of way, until around the 9:00 minute mark. She’s going to jail over nothing, but the only thing that can get a rise out of her is being separated from her phone. It’s her Precious. It tells her everything she needs to know, succors her, protects her, and assures her she’s going to get a discount, not arrested. There’s even a name for this phenomenon now: nomophobia.

Nomophobia (short for “no mobile phobia”) is a word for the fear of, or anxiety caused by, not having a working mobile phone. It has been considered a symptom or syndrome of problematic digital media use…

I’d explore the effects of male smartphone use, but it’s a waste of time. Men don’t progress past being 7 years old anyway, no matter what they’re clutching.

Last Thursday, I Lied

August 26, 2013 24 Comments
[Editor’s Note: Welcome Instapundit readers. Since you’re new here, I should explain that our little boy in the video is three years older now, and not all that interested in Presidents anymore, but he is the Greatest Ten-Year-Old Drummer In The World.]
[Author’s Note: There is no editor]

Er, I misspoke. I was wrong. Flat wrong. The wrongness, it burns. I messed up. Brain fart. Don’t be mizzled, brother; I misled you. I disseminated misinformation to the point of dissimulation. I bore false witness, even if it was against myself, mostly.

Here’s the whopper I told, almost without thinking:

Our children are homeschooled.

That’s not quite correct. Mi dispiace. I best get to expiating my guilt by explaining myself to you fine people, before I end up asking a ghoul with a hot trident for a glass of icewater for all eternity.

Words mean things. At least they used to. They’re currently debased and euphemized until nobody knows nothin’ about nuthin’ by reading the newspaper. “Homeschooling” has been freighted with meaning, and it’s not the meaning I want it to have, but I used it anyway, because newspapers that call someone’s boyfriend their “partner” have worn me out. I tried using the lingua franca to save time. It was a mistake. Let’s fix it.

It would have been much more accurate for me to tell you that my children are receiving a public school education at home. They are. They simply don’t attend the public school; they’re getting this education from my wife, inside my house.

Hmm. But that’s bound to give you the wrong idea, too; you’ll assume that means we’re giving the kids the same sort of education that’s being offered in those buildings they still call public schools. You see, there are no public schools in America that I know of. They’re reeducation camps for people that weren’t educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime — but there’s not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.

I grew up in the same town as Horace Mann. I know all about public schools. The concept is as dead as a Pharaoh. The idea that universal literacy and a coherent public attitude toward citizenship would result in a better life for the country as a whole was a sweet one, and it worked for a while, until they “fixed” it. They’ve been fixing the hell out of it for over half a century now. They fixed it the way a veterinarian fixes dogs, to my eye.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of Horace Mann’s reasons for public schooling:

(1) the public should no longer remain ignorant
(2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public
(3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds
(4) that this education must be non-sectarian
(5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society
(6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers. Mann worked for more and better equipped school houses, longer school years (until 16 years old), higher pay for teachers, and a wider curriculum.

Let’s take them in turn, and see how Old Howlin’ Horace’s ideas have turned out in what’s called the public schools, but aren’t anymore.

1) Is that cursive? I don’t read cursive.
2) The public seems completely uninterested in what happens in public school, or they wouldn’t send their kids there. Anyone really interested in public schools is horrified by what they find out. Talk to a teacher about what they’re required to do in there — after they’ve had a few drinks. I have. One I spoke to referred to themselves as a “tard farmer.” Do you want to sent your children to a “tard farm”? We don’t.
3) My children are from a variety of backgrounds, all by themselves. We didn’t turn either of them away. Tell my Irish grandmother and wife’s Calabrian grandfather that all white people are the same. Bring a weapon to defend yourself. A “back-up piece” is probably a good idea if you’re talking to my grandmother, by the way.
4) Public Schools aren’t non-sectarian. They teach their own religion, and persecute any vestige of any other, except for momentary alliances with subcultures that will help them persecute what they feel is the dominant culture outside the school.
5) Parents are not allowed to enter a public school, even to walk their children to the door. Children are routinely persecuted for any behavior that deviates one iota from the what a militant vegan on a recumbent bicycle prefers. That’s not the spirit, method, or discipline of a free society.
6) Teachers are well-trained and professional — just not in delivering an education to children. They are trained to be vestal virgins in a weird temple that forgot where they put the statue of the deity of mammon they worship. If public school worked, everyone who graduated from it would be capable of teaching in one.

The teachers in public school are as much at the mercy of this weird situation as the students. A teacher recently told us she has to keep a dossier on every child in the class, every day. That’s the Stasi, not Goodbye, Mr. Chips. They said that it’s not possible, really, so they have to make stuff up to finish it. All that time is subtracted from what little time they have for the kids in the first place. The teachers don’t know where all these weird directives come from any more than you do. They just don’t want to get fired for forgetting to rat out little Timmy if he chews his Pop-Tart in to a recognizable weapon-like shape. They go along to get along.

We like our kids too much to go along to get along, so my wife and I set up our own public school. The desks are in a row. There’s only one row, with one desk, but still, it’s a row. There’s a flag on the wall, unironically hung, because we’re not ingrates. The public –our children — have not remained ignorant. My wife and I would appear to an alien as the most “interested public” on the face of this earth, since we’re doing it ourselves, with no help and no money, and a lot of opposition, while the rock-and-roll moms abandon their children at the public school so they can go get their infected tattoos looked at. Oh, and by the way, 100 percent of our students are immunized against childhood diseases, because Jenny McCarthy isn’t regarded as an adequate peer reviewer for Jonas Salk at our school. She is at the public school.

Our children are taught moral rectitude, by word and deed, just like Horace Mann intended. His term, “non-sectarian,” had nothing to do with being irreligious. He explicitly said one kind of Christianity shouldn’t trump another kind in school. That’s it. A very strict Know-Nothing religion, consisting of little more than a fetish for recycling and ancient imaginary score-settling, is all that is allowed in public schools. That’s not non-sectarian. That’s one sect. Hell, we allow our children to know that there’s more than one kind of light bulb. That’s blasphemy in public school.

As I said, I grew up in the same town as Horace Mann. So I know for a dead cert that they tore down Horace Mann’s house and put up a shitty stripmall in its place in the 1960s. It’s the absolute perfect metaphor for what happened to his idea, too.

It’s Disheartening To Consider We’ve Used Up These Proud Giants And Brought Them Near To Extinction

July 7, 2012 12 Comments

What? No, I’m not taking about the trees. There’s plenty of trees. I live in western Maine. A tree is a weed. I’m talking about the men. Those men you see working there in the video. They’ve been hunted nearly to extinction as far as I can tell. They were marvelous.

The forests shown in this film are filled with sequoia sempervirens again, planted by the same men we just watched cutting them down. There are currently around 900,000 acres of redwoods being “actively managed,” a modern euphemism for being logged and replanted. They do it more intelligently than they once did, I guess; but there’s currently plenty of forest on fire out west that was being “intelligently managed,” so that’s no guarantee that intelligence involves any wisdom.  It’s a dirty little secret that you can cut down the trees and use the wood for something useful for people every once in a while, or wait for nature to supply bugs and fires to get rid of them — but one way or the other, they don’t last forever.

They’re cutting second-growth trees in California now. 900,000 acres is 1.35 Rhode Islands, for those of you keeping score. Rhode Island isn’t that big, you might say, but I wouldn’t want to rake it. They leave a bunch of gigantic sequoias alone in National Parks now, so we can go look at them, which is as good a use for them as building another split-level ranch to get foreclosed on, I guess. I don’t know where you go to look at men like the men in the video now. They’re probably panhandling in San Francisco and drinking mouthwash.

I noticed some inconvenient inconvenient truth at around the six-minute mark. I’m sure they’ll airbrush that out of there next time.

Tag: education

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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