The Skinner Box School

“The ‘Skinner-Box’ School” by Jed Brown was published in the March 1994 issue of Squibbs and is reprinted here in its entirety.


Outcome-Based Education (OBE) has become a blight on the landscape of our national heritage. After only a few years of OBE, whole school systems are beginning to wither and die. Much worse, the children, their minds once fertile fields of intellectual soil, are even now being infected by the worm of ignorance. True learning is starved to death, as all of the nutrients of sound academic practice are being replaced with a dust-bowl curriculum that is structured to secure proper attitudes for the “Brave New World.” Sadly, the only “outcome” of OBE will be a baser society, a society in which the nobility of the mind is lost to the savagery of enslavement.

But wait! Parents have been told that Outcome-Based Education has nothing to do with changing the attitudes and values of their children; that OBE will improve learning for all children through “best-practices” research. What parents are not being told is that the research base for OBE is from the field of psychology, not education; that in psychology the term “learning” is synonymous with the term “conditioning.” What parents are not being told is that Outcome-Based Education is not education al all; it is but the hollow substitute of psychological conditioning or, as it is sometimes called, behavior modification.