Since the two assumptions lead to consistent and incompatible systems, arguing beyond the assumptions is unproductive.  It is pointless, for instance, to discuss the value of behavior control.  Skinner's argument is logical, and it is also inevitable.  Scientific evidence supports it, and the behaviorists will accept no other evidence.  If his assumption is valid, behavior control is necessary and humane.

If his assumption is not valid, the opposite assumption is valid, and in that case behavior control is fantastically inhumane.  There is no room for compromise between the assumptions or the systems.  It is only at their fundamental assumptions that the systems interact, and it is there that the battle must be fought.

Similarly, the two systems imply different kinds of learning.  The behaviorists say that if you stimulate an organism long enough to behave in a certain way, eventually it will respond in that way with only initial stimulation.  This they define as learning, and they limit their definition of learning to that pattern.  Behavioral objectives, if they become universal, will limit schools to that kind of learning.  Identify the organism; identify the response you are seeking; identify the stimulation that should produce that response; identify the method you plan to use to determine whether that response has occurred.  Learning is programmed and mechanical, in measurable quantities.

No one denies that this definition fits most learning, but it excludes the most important learning, and it is in limiting learning to this pattern that the behaviorists err.  We also, and far more importantly, learn in another way.  A high school history teacher in Boston could spend several weeks teaching his classes about the Capitol building in Washington.  He could cover its architecture, its history and its functions, and if he did a thorough job his students could learn a great deal about the Capitol.

Or he could pile his students on a bus and take them to Washington, and dump them on the steps of the Capitol.  By the end of the day they would also know something about the building, and they might know more than the weeks in class could have taught them.  Whatever they learned they would know more deeply than anything they could have learned in class.

The illustration is not intended as a justification for field trips but a model for another kind of learning.  The bus trip (call it a leap) from Boston to Washington is apparently outside the learning experience, but once the leap has been made the seeing is inevitable, so it is really the leap that is significant.  The model fits within the mind, and there the distance covered by the leaps is far greater.

Most bodies of thought follow inevitably from first principles.  Working out the implications might take brilliance and time, but it does not necessarily take invention, and most of the thinking involved is mechanical, thinking as a computer can think.  Most of the principles which trigger this deductive process are not reached inductively--they are not derived from experiments and they do not result from long, hard looks at bodies of information.  Experiments (attempts to prove principles already guessed at) come later, and it is the principles which organize the information, rather than the information leading to the principles.  There is simply too much information (much of it false and a great deal of it contradictory) for induction to be effective.  The generalization must come first.  It can then organize the information, revealing the facts which are important and verifying the generalization.

If the principle is a true one (or perhaps if it is a logical enough false one), once it has been reached it will organize the facts so effectively that it will afterwards be difficult to imagine a world unorganized.  We simply assume the laws of gravity and inertia; before Newton things fell and moved as they do now, but there was no pattern to explain the motion.  Newton changed man's relationship to the world.

And how did Newton make his discoveries?  Here are two paragraphs (found by knowing they would be there, and getting a book and looking for them) from a chapter on Newton in a book by Oliver Lodge called Pioneers of Science (note--The apple had fallen and Newton had guessed at the law of gravitation, but had been thrown off in his calculations by an error in what was then thought to be the circumference of the earth.  He abandoned the idea, but sixteen years later he heard that a new calculation of the circumference had been made, resulting in a new figure.)

He took out his old papers and began again the calculation.  If gravity were the force keeping the moon in orbit, it would fall to the earth sixteen feet every minute.  How far did it fall?  The newly known size of the earth would modify the figures; with intense excitement he runs through the working, his mind leaps before his hand, and as he perceives the answer to be coming out right, all the infinite meaning and scope of his mighty discovery flashes upon him, and he can no longer see the paper.  He throws down the pen; and the secret of the universe is, to one man, known.

But of course it had to be worked out.  The meaning might flash upon him, but its full detail required years of elaboration; and deeper consequences revealed themselves to him as he proceeded.

And Newton was a leap:  because he took the time and made the effort to work out the implications, all of mankind made the leap with him.  The significant fact about all of the greatest men is that they are leaps--men can be different after them than they could before them.  They have leaped, and though they cannot reproduce that shock of recognition in other men, they can perhaps produce something like it, and they can at least make the distance negotiable by shorter steps.

Leaps are also possible on a much smaller, completely personal scale.  The fact that a discovery has been made countless times, that it could not properly be called a discovery at all but fairly common knowledge, does not mean that it should not come to a student as a discovery, or that he would not be far more impressed with it if he leaped to it than if it were presented to him as "today's lesson."  This does not mean that we should abandon what we know and expect students to learn by periodic flashes of insight.  Newton leaped because he maintained a constant readiness to leap, because he was constantly exploring, with the direction for his exploration growing out of the exploration itself.

Schools should attempt to maintain a similar atmosphere of inquiry and flexibility.  The behaviorists, with their programmed education--predetermined objectives, predetermined methods, predetermined standards of performance, and the student expected to fit himself into and measure himself against the structure--cannot inspire leaps or even explain them.  If you are attempting to stimulate an organism to behave in a certain way and it responds in another way, you are a failure, no matter how valid the unexpected response might be.  The behaviorist model for learning precludes leaps.

Teaching should be a process of maneuvering leaps rather than manipulating students.  It is impossible to program a student to leap, but it is possible to inspire him to leap, and that should be the function of the teacher.  His attitude should say to his students that "I am not an authority; I know closer to nothing than to everything, and about many things I know far less than you do.  But I do know how to find information, and I will be eager to help you in any way I can.  And in those places where I am more at home than you are, I will be happy to guide you."

Schools should above all be flexible.  They should be filled with up-to-date information readily available.  Curriculums should be constantly changing, and should grow out of student interest.  Teaching methods should be determined by individual situations, but independent study and small group discussions should predominate.  Individual classes should have an element of teacher control (if the students wanted to know something which the teacher already knew or could organize more quickly than the students) but any control imposed from outside would necessarily be a reduction in flexibility, and learning is only effective as an exploratory process.

If completing high school entailed completing sixteen credits (several each in the humanities, the sciences, and the rest wherever the student wanted them) and attaining a proficiency in English, the report to the parents would be like a transcript, stating how far the student had gone in his program, the "names" of the credits he had gotten (no two transcripts would be alike, and course "titles" would be extremely good indications of student interests) and whether he had simply gotten the credit or had earned honors credit.  Teacher comments on a student's independent work could become a part of a student's permanent record.

Administrators and teachers in a school set up this way would have to be able to cope with uncertainty, and ideally should thrive on it.  The normal set-up would be reversed:  the students would be autonomous, and everything else would be variable.  And perhaps no public high school, watched by a conservative school board and a wary, suspicious public, could get away with it.  Maybe there is too much in the American system working against education in favor of training for any totally open school to exist for long, but that is the way that education shouldbe, and if I am ever on a curriculum committee, though I will not be able to get the school set up completely this way, I will attempt to be a force for freedom, and I may be able to pull the average in the right direction.