ABSTRACT
Education is another field in which Skinner’s contribution has perhaps occurred ahead of his time. He was best known in the 1960s, and since then has been widely and strongly attacked, for his proposal to use teaching machines. He worked out the idea of building inexpensive electromechanical devices, which were rejected because they were said to dehumanise schools. A few years later, the cheap personal computer was popularised, and computer companies invested time and effort in all sorts of computer assisted learning or teaching, which received wide and uncritical acceptance, with very few ethical objections. The pioneering work of Skinner is rarely acknowledged in that context. The principles applied are those he had painfully attempted to implement in home-made gadgets, and tested on his own students.
