Liberal Arts Blog — Jean Piaget (1896–1980), B.F. Skinner (1904–1990), Erik Erikson (1902–1994)
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic: Jean Piaget (1896–1980), B.F. Skinner (1904–1990), Erik Erikson (1902–1994)
This is the fourth in a series on the most important psychologists of the last century and a half.
We started with Sigmund Freud (4/2/24). Then Carl Jung (4/9/24). Then William James (4/232/24).
Today, perhaps the next three most renowned figures in the field. Did any one of them say anything worth remembering? This morning I went foraging. Below, the best I could find.
Are you a fan of Piaget? Erikson? Skinner? What were their most penetrating insights?
Your favorite quotes? Or perhaps you prefer Carl Rogers, Albert Bandura, Steven Pinker?
Parenthetically, when I was a resident tutor at Mather House in 1980 I invited BF Skinner to a predecessor of the Adams House What Matters Table. I had a 4 month old son at the time and asked him what to do to get Andrei to sleep through the night. His response: “Turn up the temperature.” (For details on the operation of the “Air Crib” and the “Skinner Box” aka “operant conditioning chamber,” see the last two links below.)
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
JEAN PIAGET (1896–1990) — Swiss child psychologist, Director of the Center For Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva, 1955–1980
1. “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.”
2. “What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.”
3. “Only education is capable of saving society from collapse whether violent or gradual.”
NB: “The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers; who can be critical and verify, not accept, everything they are offered.”
BF SKINNER (1904–1990) — behavioral psychologist — famous for his pigeons in his William James lab, for the “Skinner box” for babies, and for “Walden Two”
1. “Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.”
2. “No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn’t die out, it’s wiped out.”
3. “What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.”
NB: “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.”
ERIK ERIKSON (1902–1994) author of “Childhood and Society,” in which he introduced the concept of “identity crisis.” He taught at Harvard and Yale, refugee from Hitler’s Europe, Pulitzer Prize for “Gandhi’s Truth (1969)
1. “Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.”
2. “Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.”
3. “The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.”
NB: “You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what’s wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity and whatever’s in them rises to the surface in free play.”
Jean Piaget Quotes (Author of The Psychology of Intelligence)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/31631.B_F_Skinner
Erik H. Erikson Quotes (Author of Childhood and Society)
Operant conditioning chamber — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFS:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
