"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading"
About this Quote
Skinner’s line is a quiet provocation disguised as common sense: stop worshipping the canon and start engineering desire. Coming from the father of behaviorism, it’s not a Hallmark sentiment about cozy afternoons with novels. It’s a pragmatic claim about cause and effect. “Great books” are treated in schools like medicine: prescribed, monitored, and frequently spat out. Skinner is arguing that the institution has confused the product (a sanctioned list) with the mechanism that actually produces lifelong literacy: reinforcement, curiosity, momentum, pleasure.
The intent is partly corrective, partly insurgent. Skinner is poking at a cultural reflex that equates seriousness with difficulty and cultural value with suffering. Teaching “great books” often becomes teaching compliance: decode the “right” themes, perform reverence, write the five-paragraph essay, get the grade. The subtext is bluntly behavioral: if reading is paired with anxiety, humiliation, or boredom, you don’t get enlightened citizens; you get adults who claim they “used to read” and mean “before school killed it.”
Context matters. Mid-20th-century American education was steeped in gatekeeping curricula, while Skinner was championing programmed instruction and environments designed to shape behavior. His quote pushes the debate off moral terrain (What should students read?) and onto design terrain (What experiences make them want to keep reading when nobody is grading them?). It’s also a swipe at cultural status games: a love of reading is democratic; a syllabus of “greatness” can be a filter.
The intent is partly corrective, partly insurgent. Skinner is poking at a cultural reflex that equates seriousness with difficulty and cultural value with suffering. Teaching “great books” often becomes teaching compliance: decode the “right” themes, perform reverence, write the five-paragraph essay, get the grade. The subtext is bluntly behavioral: if reading is paired with anxiety, humiliation, or boredom, you don’t get enlightened citizens; you get adults who claim they “used to read” and mean “before school killed it.”
Context matters. Mid-20th-century American education was steeped in gatekeeping curricula, while Skinner was championing programmed instruction and environments designed to shape behavior. His quote pushes the debate off moral terrain (What should students read?) and onto design terrain (What experiences make them want to keep reading when nobody is grading them?). It’s also a swipe at cultural status games: a love of reading is democratic; a syllabus of “greatness” can be a filter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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