Harry Schwartz Eats the World

Superstition in the Pigeon, and rambling about education

I just finished B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, the influential psychologist’s fictional account of a behaviorist utopia. Since I have the (bad?) habit of only reading a book’s associated Wikipedia page after reading the work itself, I only just now learned about Skinner’s experimentation with pigeons. Minds are awesome!

On a totally different topic, reading Walden Two also got me thinking about education. Much like Randall Munroe’s treehouse, there’s a process running in the background of my mind that’s constantly thinking about the perfect college. Self-directed learning and intentional communities seem like ideas that would positively reinforce each other. The needs of a small community would constantly provide practical problems which would both necessitate and reward innovation, while hopefully the constant injection of new ideas would help the community to thoughtfully grow in useful directions. So I guess I’m describing a secular, progressive monastery? Except with a good broadband connection and an easy commute to a major cultural center. Independence -/-> isolation.

On a related note, Deep Springs College. I’d love to visit there someday and see how it operates. Or, you know, teach there in a decade or so. I’d also like to visit Twin Oaks. And I can’t very well write a post about self-directed education without mentioning Sphere College, which I understand is coming together beautifully.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 10:00 pm and is filed under animals, books, old dead white guys, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.