Contrasting Perspectives: Implications for Education and Creative Minds
America educates students through stimulus and response
B.F. Skinner stands in stark contrast to William James, who many consider to be the founder of American psychology. While Skinner primarily based his research on animal subjects such as pigeons and rats, William James grounded his work in the full range of human experience, offering greater validity in understanding how people actually respond to psychological stimuli. James, a polymath, believed in functionalism: a school of thought that put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of mental processes in enabling an individual to adapt to the environment. Since Skinner did not believe that mental processes were within the purview of the study of human behavior, it’s not hard to view James as the diametric opposite of Skinner—and more aligned with what Jefferson and others thought was critical for the education of our children.
Most would argue that what happens in the classroom is critical in defining lifelong patterns of behavior. This is evident not only in the wide-eyed acceptance of elite-serving propaganda, but also in how far the country has fallen in terms of creative accomplishments across all areas of intellectual life. Physics is one of many critical examples that showcases this decline. The three major areas of modern physics—special relativity, general relativity, and quantum field theory—were all fully formed by the mid-1970s. Since the mid-70s, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on elaborate physical equipment, largely in an attempt to unify general relativity with quantum field theory. To date—and this is a subject for a subsequent blog—those efforts have proven futile.
Here is a possible action line which shows why that futility is not surprising: the stimulus is that monetary support for university-based science is waning greatly; the response is that a consortium of countries agrees massive spending on a science project would both create jobs and support graduate programs. Since its creation in the early 1950s, the particle colliders built under the auspices of the multi-country project known as CERN have witnessed enormous growth in budget. For example, in 1964 about a hundred million dollars was spent on the collider program. Since then, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. We pick 1964 as a starting point because that was the year John Bell, a scientist working on the collider, published what most would agree was the major result dealing with the unification of physics. Not surprisingly, the result, known as Bell’s Inequality, did not come in the course of his work at CERN, but rather was derived while Bell was on sabbatical, as his work on the collider was both time consuming and unrelated to the work he did at CERN, where creative research was secondary to massive and costly experimentation.
The stimulus-response form of education as we showed in part 1, is consistent with the type of labeling associated with wokeness. Wokeness, a form of labeling is at odds with individual humanity and creativity—and the American spirit of individuality so essential to our founding fathers. More important, wokeness—much to our detriment—applies to nearly all aspects of human activity. Bell stood out as he saw physics as much more than the attempt to find results conformal to a gospel that required very expensive experimentation.
Our view of the “right” form of government follows a similar course with tragic results. As school children we are taught “totalitarianism” and “authoritarianism” are down-and-dirty pejoratives. A totalitarian country like Russia, for instance, is framed as an enemy— no questions permitted.
The brave questioner stands out but still is often not heard. In 2012, Paul Robinson’s writing for The American Conservative published an article on Putin’s favorite philosopher, Ivan Ilyin. Ilyin, a proud believer in Russian culture, left the country when the Communists seized control during the second revolution. He spent the rest of his life in exile and died in Switzerland, where he was buried.
Shortly after assuming power in 2000, Putin paid to have Ilyin’s remains moved back to Russia, as he saw Ilyin’s thinking as a vital—even sacred—guide to a successful Russia. Ilyin believed that though the state should have dictatorial powers, those powers should be limited in scope. In his words:
“The ruler must have popular support... the principle of legality must be preserved, and all people must be equal under the law. Freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly must be guaranteed. Private property should be sacrosanct.”
Moreover, Ilyin believed the state should completely avoid involvement in areas where it lacked expertise, including private life and religion. He believed that totalitarianism should be “godless.”
We’re not going to apply for Russian citizenship anytime soon, but we are willing to take lessons that all blind stereotyping from racial, to forms of government, to scientific research, stultifies the freedom, creativity and humanity that were once the backbone of the greatest country the world has ever known.
Putin may not be the Ilyin ideal, but his is a far cry from Stalin and the many “autocratic” leaders that preceded him. Putin took over a Russia in 2000 that had a GDP per capita of about $1,000 that was characterized by sharply declining life expectancy. It was riddled with antisemitism and Sinophobia. Today Russia is a superpower characterized by rapid growth and military technologies that far exceed those of the United States in certain areas of military technology. In the decade beginning in 2010, a convocation of orthodox Jewish Rabbis voted Russia the best country to live for Jews in the Eurasian continent.
So far, Trump’s instincts to form a relationship with Putin have been thwarted by senseless "hate-Russia" thinking throughout much of our government. And if, for whatever reason, we cannot shed our hate-Russia mentality, then let’s at least return to a love-of-freedom mentality—while engaging in a metaphorical burning of books and papers authored by B.F. Skinner, and giving those authored by William James a much more prominent place in our libraries.
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