Love Quote by B. F. Skinner

Skinner’s provocation lands like a dart at the sanctimony of “the canon,” and it’s very on-brand for a psychologist who spent his career reducing lofty ideals to observable behavior. He’s not merely arguing about syllabi; he’s attacking the prestige economy of education. “Great books” function as cultural capital: proof you belong, that you can name-check the right authors at the right dinner table. Skinner calls that “trivial” not because literature is trivial, but because the schoolish act of possessing content is the easiest metric to test, grade, and flaunt.

The subtext is behavioral: if schooling creates readers who stop reading the moment the assignment ends, it has failed at the only outcome that compounds over a lifetime. A love of reading is a self-reinforcing habit, a loop of curiosity and reward. In Skinner’s terms, you don’t want a one-time performance (recite themes, identify symbols); you want a durable disposition that survives outside the classroom’s reward system.

Context matters: Skinner came of age alongside mass schooling’s obsession with standardization and, later, the anxiety of Cold War credentialing. His line reads like an indictment of education as compliance training. Teach “great books,” and you may produce students who can pass a test on greatness. Teach the appetite for reading, and you produce people who keep building their own canon, which is both more democratic and more dangerous: harder to control, harder to quantify, harder to turn into a badge. That’s why it works. It’s an argument for education as ignition, not inventory.