During WWII, the U.S. government paid B. F. Skinner to train an elite group of pigeons to guide their bombs.  The little birds would be tucked into a jacket made of a sock, positioned inside a bomb, and expected to peck at a screen on which an image of the target was projected by a lens in the bomb’s nose.  Every peck would send an electronic signal to the bomb’s flight controls so it could keep the mark in the crosshairs.  Sadly, the stress of real combat—the explosions and high rates of speed as they dropped—unnerved the little bombirdiers, so Skinner employed one last stroke of genius: He fed the pigeons hemp before their missions; apparently it calmed their minds so they could focus on the task! The birds’ training regimen was fairly straightforward: Skinner rewarded them for doing what he wanted. He had the pigeons peck at aerial photographs of the targets, and when they kept the crosshairs on the mark, a pellet of grain would drop into a tray in front of them.1 His idea never really took off; RADAR was no doubt closer to what the War Department brass had in mind. Nevertheless, it set Skinner to thinking: If he could control the behavior of pigeons by such conditioning drills, why not human beings as well?

Skinner waved off the obvious objection that humans are different from pigeons. Darwin, after all, had laid that superstition to rest, and other psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Ivan Pavlov with his salivating dog, and J. B. Watson were going even further in dehumanizing humans. These “behaviorists” rejected any notion of mind, soul, feeling, or consciousness and insisted that all human behavior could be explained in simple mechanical terms as response to a stimulus. In the course of a single century, mankind was reduced from person to animal to, now, machine.2

B. F. Skinner became the most influential behaviorist of the twentieth century. As a professor of psychology at Harvard, he taught his undergraduates that all talk of human dignity or freedom was superstition. In fact, scientists could condition human beings to act in any way they wanted them to, just by applying a few scientific principles:

First, human beings are nothing more than highly developed animals who learn in the same way that other animals learn. Skinner said as much in his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity: Evolution may have lifted humans to the top of the food chain, but really they are no more conscious, spiritual, dignified, or free than a pigeon.

Second, human nature is nothing but a reactive mechanism. People act the way they do because they receive “rewards” or “punishments” for their actions. An action resulting in reward will be performed more often; one resulting in punishment, less often. The task of scientists is to observe human action in order to identify the “laws of behavior” which lead humans to act one way or another.3

Finally, human action can be manipulated and controlled by applying these laws of behavior. “Give me the baby,” boasted one behaviorist, “and . . . the possibility of shaping in any direction is almost endless.”4

The behaviorists’ great hope was that, in time, a new generation literally programmed by scientists to be good citizens might finally make the world “fit for human habitation.” And what better place to begin the experiment than in the public schools? Influenced by Skinner’s theories, many educators began to see education as a means of conditioning, a process of behavioral engineering whereby the passive child could be pressed into the mold deemed most “beneficial” by social planners.

The trouble with this idea of education is that it flies in the face of Scripture’s portrayal of human nature. Skinner and his followers saw students as passive automatons, brutes that could be molded and manipulated to fit the visions of social engineers. In the process they stripped them of all care and motivation, teaching them rather to rely on the “experts” for their every need. Christian teachers, by contrast, can never think of their students as mere animals to be programmed like pigeons. They see them rather as God does—as whole persons, created in God’s image. Consequently, they teach them to pursue lives worthy of their inherent dignity, lives of industry, initiative, and responsibility.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Greg Gobbell, “[3.0] World War II Glide Bombs,” (Greg Gobbel: In the Pubic Domain Website, 2002), http://www.vectorsite.net/twbomb3.html.
 
2  Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1999), 176-177.
 
3  George R. Knight, Philosophy and Education, (Berrien Springs: Andrews University, 1998), 128-129.
 
4  Quoted in Colson, 177.
 
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First Baptich Church is located in Perryville, Cecil County.