ABSTRACT
Burrhus Frederic Skinner develops a view of human beings, and of causal agents determining human conduct, that shakes many accepted principles founding modern society. In fact, the educational practices to which Skinner objects and which he remedies in the imaginary society of his Utopia have been repeatedly denounced since then in other contexts, including the 1968 student movement and a number of reforms in most Western countries. Skinner anticipated further evolution of educational practices in American society with regard to the role of male adults. Skinner, long before Chomsky, had formulated his dream. And he went as far as to show how that dream could be put to work, by composing a Utopian novel. The title of the Utopian novel, Walden Two, refers to the name of a pond, Walden, near Concord, Massachusetts, where the nineteenth century American writer Henry David Thoreau retired for one year to experience solitary life, as something between Robinson Crusoe and a modern ecologist.
