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B.F. Skinner
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„The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called “conditioning.”“
„We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.“
„Many instructional arrangements seem “contrived”, but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher’s function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.It is a difficult assignment. The conditions the teacher arranges must be powerful enough to compete with those under which the student tends to behave in distracting ways.“
„Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists—to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies.“
„It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student’s life.“
„The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called “conditioning”. In operant conditioning we “strengthen” an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.“
„I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.“
„”I have been misunderstood” An interview with B. F. Skinner 1972 March/April Center Magazine, pp. 63−65“
„It is the teacher’s function to contrive conditions under which students learn. Their relevance to a future usefulness need not be obvious.“
„The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.“
„We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word “admire” then means “marvel at.”“
„The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.“
„At this very moment enormous numbers of intelligent men and women of goodwill are trying to build a better world. But problems are born faster than they can be solved.“
„What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.“
„A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.“
„Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.“
„Nowadays, everybody fancies himself an expert in government and wants to have a say.“
„Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.“
„If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that’s necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.“
„I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.“
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