Skinner maintains "There is a simple job to be done.... The necessary techniques are known. The equipment needed can easily be provided. Nothing stands in the way but cultural inertia. But what is more characteristic of America than an unwillingness to accept the traditional as inevitable? We are on the threshold of an exciting and revolutionary period, in which the scientific study of man will be put to work in man's best interests. Education must play its part. It must accept the fact that a sweeping revision of educational practice is possible and inevitable. When it has done this, we may look forward with confidence to a school system which is aware of the nature of its tasks, secure in its methods, and generously supported by the informed and effective citizens whom education itself will create."
Pulleys, Levers, and Chains
Right now, his latest machine is on workbench in the Psychology Department's machine shop in the basement of Memorial Hall. It is better described as a device than as a machine. It consists of a small wooden box with several small windows in the top, and a lever in front. Inside, there is maze of pulleys, levers, and chains and an aluminum disk about the size of a phonograph turn-table. It's really very simple, however.
On the disk, the student places another disk containing sentences to be translated or numbers to add or whatever. These are made visible one by one through one of the windows when the lever is moved. At the same time, a strip of paper comes into reach on which the student writes his answer. When he presses the lever again, the answer slides under a piece of glass so that it is visible but cannot be changed while the correct answer appears in another window. If the student's answer is correct, he moves the lever which marks the paper as correct and adjusts the machine so that the sentence appears once more. During a session with the machine, the student must answer each question correctly twice.
There will also be a phonograph in the language machine which reads a sentence to be translated to give the student dictation drill.
The progress of a student could be checked by seeing how many problems he had to answer in order to get each one correct twice. In college a talented student in language coming in on his own time could presumably come in often early in the term, work quickly, and thereby get rid of his requirement.
A term of an elementary language course might take as many as 10,000 sentences to translate, but Skinner estimates that a student could finish two disks (each with 60 sentences) in about 50 minutes: this would mean about 1,000 per week for the average student.
There might have to be a test at the end of the course, he conceded, but ultimately "we want to get away from marking."
The machine is virtually cheat-proof. If a wrong answer is marked correct by a student, the teacher can discover it; and, of course, someone might watch the student at the machine, which could also be set up in a library where a clerk could give out the disks.
What are the other applications of such machines? Skinner claims they are not restricted to languages and science, though he hopes that many languages will be covered eventually. In fact, last year Skinner tested out a similar machine on elementary school children to teach them arithmetic. The major difference at that level was that the machine had an automatic marking device.
On it, he scaled the problems so that students would get most of them correct, even giving them hints. For example, he would use larger or colored numbers in the more difficult problems. As the student advanced, the differences between the distinctions would become less and less. In a language, he says he might give words that rhyme to help in translation. "They might hit the right answer for the wrong reason, but eventually they would learn the right reason, too." Far from fearing the machine, Skinner says, "the children love it. It gives them no anxieties."
He envisions the use of such machines to teach anything that can be taught by rote, although he doesn't want to see them restricted to such uses. He thinks, for example, that the army might use them to teach coding and communication in general where a fast and accurate response is necessary.
Skinner claims that the person who adapts the machine to a particular field doesn't need to know the field so much as he must be familiar with the methodology in teaching it.
Another machine Skinner has conceived would have a card-puncher and keyboard, possibly containing all the letters of the alphabet and all the numbers, which could be used to teach spelling, arithmetic, and, perhaps, other subjects. But its design would have to be left to engineers. Skinner will not attempt it himself.
Whether the machine age will ever reach its iron tenacles into the classrooms of schools and colleges--including Harvard--is impossible to predict; but the Fund for the Advancement of Education has made certain that for at least another year, in the basement of Memorial Hall, machines will teach men; matter will rule mind