Russell - Skinner - Articulation - Education

Re-reading How to become a man of genius has reminded me how I lacked the “art of denunciation” in my feminism mail. I went straight into the theory and headed on directly into the issue too bluntly. My target was evidently attacked. I should have been more pontifical to add a cynical rhetoric.

                I have also been going through vaguely on behaviorism that involved Bertrand Russell and B. F. Skinner. But before googling anything more I selected B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior from Anthology. Initially it was quite difficult to grasp the topic but slowly as I kept reading the topics were being discussed more elaborately though the complexity of the text was always present. The essay started off with Darwinism and his study of genetics, how we have all formed from one single cell and the behaviorism of human being is different from that of a rat’s is because of the affair a human involve into and other the verbal behaviorism between them is the only difference. After following the next paragraphs I could conclude that the reflexes and the strive for survival are genetically present in both a human and a rat and as the world becomes a harsher place to survive the behavior and reflexes evolves along it in order to exist. The discussion then focuses on Biology which we can conclude as a study of the history of living beings. By coincidence, yesterday in my mock from Princeton 11, I came across similar essays on genetic biology and Darwinism. Therefore, this essay became slightly more understandable.             

                The essay continued from Biological to Psychology behaviorism, where the dealings with social shocks were discussed. Just before starting off with B.F. Skinner I was reading Russell’s essay from where I also got to know that B. F. Skinner was heavily influenced by Russell when it comes to psychology but at one point unlike Russell, Skinner started supporting pragmatism. The similarities between their ideologies were actually due to their familiar cultures.

As I continued to read about verbal behaviorism I got to know more about how complex can our reactions could be to another person’s verbal expression. My understanding of this topic came from reading another article On The Possible Influence of Bertrand Russell on B. F. Skinner's Approach to Education. Here it is explained in a more simple language about how to deal with children in schools and their studies. How praising and blaming someone in a wrong way could harm a person. I had enough personal experience to know the how important it is to verbally deal a person in order to take in control the person’s reaction to it, the words and the rhetoric must be tactfully handled.

As the article ends after short discussion on Skinner’s analysis on government and religion I am amazed to find how much I have understood about this essay, when I started reading it, I was disturb by its articulation and I doubted if I would understand the scientific and philosophic discuss in the content, but as I kept reading, it all started making sense. This is everything we are being taught in our SAT class every day, we constantly given reminder to articulate our arguments and take serious attention to our rhetoric of our content, our writings should not be only critically analyzed but also verbally competence because “Verbal competence is said to separate a man from beast”.

So if I believe in Darwinism and the testimony that all living beings are formed from one singular breathing cell, I would want to be the more eruditely evolved version by educating myself to be verbally competent.

This POST has been contributed by Umama.