Behaviorism as the Highest Form of Humanism, in K-12 Education and in Life

Behaviorist psychology, properly understood for potential in application to humanistic purposes, should be projected assertively into the morass and the splendor, the degradation and the sublimity, that is humanity.

 

I am a behaviorist with a proclivity for using behaviorist insights as to why people do what they do for humanistic applications.

 

B. F. Skinner advanced behaviorist psychology many experimental rungs upward from the foundational ideas of J. B. Watson.  

 

But I have for many moons also given a great amount of thought to the nonmaterial positive reinforcements, punishments, and negative reinforcements that are so important in shaping human behavior.  Based on my reading of Skinner and the sort of experiments that he conducted, I agree that human beings respond in essentially the same manner when behavioral operants are reinforced or punished as do other members of the animal kingdom.  I have, though, come to regard nonmaterial reinforcements and punishments as particularly important in the case of the human species, which engages in all manner of intricately complex activities. 

 

Human beings without question respond with alacrity to primary reinforcers (food, water, sex), and to the secondary reinforcers of money, status, and privileges.  But the very complex human emotions and signals represented by love, hate, empathy, condescension, smiles, frowns, and subtle differences of these and other affective expressions have a much greater role to play than in my view Skinner gave affirmation.

 

I remember reading in the work of another behaviorist once upon an epiphany that “behaviorism is a humanism”---  that when properly understood the thoughtful presentation of effective reinforcements (and, secondarily, only as necessary, punishments [preferably even then as aversive experience rather than the oft-connoted corporeal forms]) create conditions by which humanity lives life at the heights of emotional, physical, and intellectual satisfaction.

 

In my view, if humankind could be induced to comprehend deeply the chimeric nature of free will, thereby getting on top of reality in constant reflection from that summit at which the atmosphere is clear and the clouds of misunderstanding are dispersed, she and he could move forward into the realm of good decision-making that ironically would produce many of those outcomes that most of humanity currently vainly calls upon human will to produce.

                                                                                              

The most important summative message in such rumination and authorial and oratorical expressions thereof would be that humankind must act collectively to share ideas for creating that most favorable environment for ever advancing the quality of human experience:   

 

Since environment is determinative, we must as a matter of both logic and humaneness create the best environment that lies within our considerable intellectual mettle to produce.

 

We would have then paradoxically achieved through behaviorism that quality of humanism that humanist psychologists could never accomplish.

 

This is why creating an educational environment with knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum, ample conversational space to consider universal human moral values, and teachers who are exemplars of knowledge and morality, is vital to the creation of culturally enriched individual and collective lives of elevated moral dignity on this one earthly sojourn.  

 

In this way, behaviorism represents the highest development of humanism, the route to excellent K-12 education and thus humanity rising to an elevated level of knowledge and morality.