I admit to being a behaviorist, although in modified form. I have spent too much time with dogs to believe that punishment is a useful form of training. It is not sentimentality, but experience that teaches me that rewards, and withholding of rewards, can turn all dogs into "good dogs." Not all will become show, obedience or field champions, but all can be trained to turn a spit or haul a cart or serve as food for the other dogs if nothing else. A few schizophrenic or rabid dogs will have to be penned up or destroyed. (Thank you, I prefer to pen them up -- I would never have shot Old Yellow.)
Any dog trainer knows that this is true. There are no (well, very few) bad dogs who cannot be turned into useful denizens. Of course, most people know nothing true about training dogs, and many dogs have to be destroyed. But conceptually, with very little actual work, we could produce a world of happy, reasonable, hard-working, and obedient dogs.
I admit to overgeneralization, but we do much worse for our kids. Millions of unwanted fetuses are destroyed every year because too many women and men are too lazy, stupid, or deceived to practice contraception. It seems reasonable to me, on the dog model, to fix people unless we want to save them for breeding. Reversible sterilization would be fine, we need not insist on castration.
Millions of children are rendered incompetent and rebellious by bad rearing practices (especially punishment) by ignorant untrained parents. Millions more are rendered incompetent and criminal by schools (and prisons) that make them worse than they were when they came in. Many people would like us to believe that bad adults (like bad dogs) are responsible for their evil behavior (bad natures or original sin). I prefer to think that all except a few schizophrenic or brain damaged (frequently from being slapped, duked, or shaken by their mom's boy friend) children are perfectly capable of becoming successful adults (except in particularly rotten cultures like the Yanomamo and Los Angeles) with positive reinforcement of their good actions and negative reinforcement (withholding of reward) of their bad actions, and an occasional pat on the head and a "good boy" or "good girl" and a bit of chocolate (not for dogs). It would be very cheap. The children who want to be science, sports, or computer champions we can allow to enter schools where they can be tutored and share the proceeds of their remarkable success with their tutors. Everybody else can be given a multimedia computer and see what he or she can learn on their own. It should be equipped with an M&M dispenser. Interesting that the largest number of MCSE's (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) get their degrees by self study on the computer. About a fifth of them are Ph.D.'s (largely in English, Classics, and History). If people both dumb and persistent enough to study the liberal arts all the way through a dissertation can learn to reinstall Microsoft operating systems, then so can persons in the totally unschoolable strata of society. |
