Equality: Take Two

This is what I meant to say.

“A self-ordained professor’s tongue, too serious to fool; spouted out that liberty is just equality in school. Equality. I spoke the word as if a wedding vow. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

- Nobel Prize winner for literature Bob Dylan, My Back Pages, 1964.

BF Skinner’s utopia in which humans have moved Beyond Freedom and Dignity is worth a lookback as we peer into the vacuum of AI and try to make a deal. My first course in preservice teacher education took place in the basement of DeGarmo Hall filled with cubicles and Skinner machines. What Skinner could have achieved with AI! The Khan Academy would have competition.

BF Skinner conceived of a revolutionary method of instruction for its time called Programmed Instruction aka Individualized Instruction. According to his daughter, Skinner stumbled upon the insight that changed his life with an innocent twist of fate:

When the younger [daughter, Deborah] was in fourth grade, on November 11, 1953, Skinner attended her math class for Father’s Day. The visit altered his life. As he sat at the back of that typical fourth grade math class, what he saw suddenly hit him with the force of an inspiration. As he put it, ‘through no fault of her own the teacher was violating almost everything we knew about the learning process. ‘(Vargas, n.d.)

By “we,” Skinner meant “he.” What horrified him was a misalignment between teaching and learning. From his perspective, individual learners respond to a stimulus and receive individual feedback, a condition impossible to fulfill when instructing groups. Implementing lock-step group instruction would be replaced with individually guided tasks in which the “contingencies of reinforcement could be carefully controlled.”

Imagine walking into Skinner's classroom. Gone are the rows of desks where students groggily absorb lectures. Gone are the rugs where kindergartners gather for a read aloud. Each student sits before a mechanical device, revolutionary for the 1950s, doling out material in bite-sized, carefully sequenced steps.

Every correct answer triggers immediate positive reinforcement—not just a checkmark, but a click, a gear shift, the turn of a screw, advancing to the next challenge, growing confidence in mastery. The machine never grows impatient. Never shames. Each child creeps at their own petty pace through an exquisitely minted sequence of challenges, each calibrated to be tough enough to sustain engagement without rousing frustration. Vygotsky might salivate.

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Skinner saw Programmed Instruction not just as educational technology, but as social architecture. By eliminating the negative aspects of traditional education (fear of failure, public embarrassment, arbitrary pacing), he believed ‘society’ could create students who didn't just learn better, but also loved learning. The broader implications knocked his socks off: What if we could apply this same principle of precisely engineered positive reinforcement to reshape entire patterns of social behavior?

In Skinner's world, the same attention to behavioral contingencies that made his teaching machines effective at teaching mathematics could be scaled up to optimize everything from work productivity to civic engagement. Every social problem became an engineering opportunity, a matter of arranging constellation of rewards and removing punishments to guide behavior toward desired outcomes. Skinner’s ghost haunts the halls of academia.

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BF Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity described a world in which human suffering is diminished through social engineering. Skinner argued for allegiance to a deterministic ideology with behavior environmentally determined and, therefore, potentially engineered (rewards, punishments). His goal was to focus as a society on incentives to amplify behaviors that produce positive outcomes and to make salient disincentives to disappear behaviors that we hate. He argued that credit for achievements should be bestowed on the environment, not the individual, giving all for the public good.

Picture a virtuoso pianist receiving thunderous applause. Dystopian thinking says: "What extraordinary talent! What dedication!" But Skinner would have none of it. Skinner would turn to the piano teacher who shaped the technique, the parents who forced the child to practice, the culture that valued musical excellence, even the inventors of the piano itself. In his view, applauding individual genius was like praising a leaf for photosynthesis while ignoring the sunlight. The butterfly's beauty is the reflection of a thousand natural potions and spells falling perfectly into place.

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Skinner’s ideas somehow got into my head when I was in high school, beginning to write poetry with some regularity. I met Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, a seven-foot fourteen-year-old fictional marvel of a human being, when I was around fourteen. This was when we were all talking about ‘contingency,’ free will as a theme in our literature class—probably where the phrase beyond freedom and dignity got wedged in my head.

Harrison Bergeron and Holden Caulfield formed two sides of a coin as I saw them in my slightly askew way, one showing no vulnerabilities, the other defined by vulnerabilities; one an agent of strength and great potential weighed down by society, the other a sensitive plant crushed by a phony humanity in a cold cruel world. Vonnegut’s opening:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The U.S. Handicapper General did a job on Harrison. During the Age of Equality beyond freedom and dignity, Harrison is forced to wear 300 pounds of scrap metal to counteract his strength and his agility.  To prevent him from tapping into his superior intelligence, Harrison is equipped with enormous earphones that emit constant loud noises intended to disrupt his thoughts. (I think these earphones show up in Dylan’s song Ballad of the Thin Man.)

Holden, on the other hand, is broken by life’s unequal betrayals. He can't shake the image of James Castle lying there dead, in his, Holden’s, own sweater, James, who had been cruelly bullied to the point of jumping out a window yet no one cared why. The death of Allie from leukemia, Holden’s younger brother, enraged him to be living in a world so callous about killing innocent children, driving him more deeply into the role of catcher in the rye.

*****

The fight for educational equality isn't just about lifting up the disadvantaged. It’s about confronting a system designed to maintain advantage too much like Skinner’s utopia. While some children face institutional barriers and routine messages undermining their potential, others benefit from institutional resources and support to reach their potential: Their talents are celebrated, their mistakes forgiven, their futures bright.

The system's genius lies in making privilege appear as merit, and structural advantages seem like individual achievements. Those at the top believe they've earned their position through hard work and merit. Those at the bottom often internalize the system's judgment of their worth.

Real equality would require constructing the same scaffolds of advantage in the schools that serve the disadvantaged. Confronting the social reproduction of power in affluent schools while subjugation too often results in the thousands of under-resourced schools is necessary, but not sufficient, for emancipatory schooling. The existential investment many have in maintaining the social reproduction of advantage, even as they speak the language of equal opportunity, remains intractable.

Somewhere I learned to respect the wisdom of this aphorism. I wish I knew to whom to attribute the words:

“Nothing is irrelevant. There is only our failure to see its relevance.”

—Anonymous