Walden Two Psychology

Improved Essays
Some of the first learning experiences children have are often through the eyes of fictional characters. From Nancy Drew and Harry Potter, to Cinderella and
Geronimo Stilton, we solve problems, learn social skills, and develop schemas for life by being immersed in fictional worlds.
Why not, then, learn psychological concepts in college through reading for pleasure? B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948) is an example of illustrating complex psychological concepts through the exploration of a fictional world.
Costantino (1994) found that students for whom English was a second language improved their ability to read academic texts after several weeks of reading romance novels in English. Gallik (1999) argued that students who read for pleasure make

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    Ellen C. Carillo’s “Reading & Writing are Not Connected” challenges and disproves the fallacy claimed in her title. Carillo, a professor of English, speaks from her experience as an educator to articulate the importance of a comprehensive reading-writing education. Drawing from the historical and modern scapegoats for student illiteracy, Carillo debunks these theories and concludes that reading and writing are best learned when taught in conjunction. This point is effectively communicated through the numerous examples of the “real world” implications of poor reading/writing skills, like an inability to analyze and interpret their surroundings. The idea that a lack of these abilities connects with television consumption because much like reading,…

    • 261 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Great Essays

    The author, Timothy Shanahan, wrote “You Want me to Read What?!” which was published in November of 2013 in the Educational Leadership publication, and he makes a valid argument that informational text is as important as literary readings in the English classroom. Shanahan builds on his standing with facts clearly built from his research, citing compelling facts and data. Shanahan’s “You Want me to Read What?!” effectively persuades that teaching informational text and literary readings are equally important by presenting an optimistic view combined with strong evidence, research and statistics.…

    • 985 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Walk in Nature Thoreau once said,“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” In my case, however, it was brief walk. I began by jumping off a deck, a metaphor for leaving society behind. Much like Thoreau did in his Walden Pond experiment.…

    • 1066 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Our lives and everything around us is literature. When Sopeap is teaching Sang Ly in one of her lessons, Sang Ly wonders why we read stories and how they can help her Sopeap respond, “...every story we read, Sang Ly, is about us, in one way or another.” (94). As Sang Ly reads more stories about fictional characters she realizes that those fictional characters are actually real characters in her life. Sang…

    • 831 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Walden Two Analysis

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Walden two final Walden Two is a utopian novel wherein the society depicted, human problems and social ills are solved by scientific technology applied to human conduct,called social behavioral engineering. Skinner shows us the society and ideology of Walden Two through the eyes of outsiders who show varying degrees of skepticism or enthusiasm for the behaviorally engineered society. Skinner shows us many diifernt ways he would correct society. The examples are , Education is based on freedom and self-motivation.…

    • 906 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Being alone in nature is the best thing to help a person be happy and find him or herself. That is the message both Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Emily Dickinson's How Happy is the Little Stone. In the How Happy is the Little Stone, the poem starts out with “How Happy is the little Stone That rambles on the Road alone,” this shows that the rock is happy because he is all alone. We know he is all alone because the poem states that “And independent as the Sun” the speaker is trying to show that he has things around him, but he is the only one of his kind like the sun is surrounded by planets.…

    • 352 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Into the Wild vs Walden Into the Wild, a book about a man who ran away from childhood problems and decided to walk into the wilderness by himself after getting rid of all of his materialistic items including his car and money, and Walden, a book about a man who fled towards simplicity and solitude to understand what life was really about, are two incredible books. The stories are timeless and will likely still be talked about in fifty years. The protagonists, Thoreau and Chris, shared many similarities and differences. One big difference between them is their motives for leaving the city and going into the wilderness; Thoreau wanted to live life to the fullest, while Chris wanted to leave the problems at home. Both Chris and Thoreau rejected…

    • 1390 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Author Stephen King once said, “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” I love this quote because it rings true to me. As a little girl, I remember opening the pages of my favorite fairytale and becoming part of the story. I was the princess waiting for my knight in shining armor. or the peasant girl waiting for my fairy godmother to come and turn my life right side up.…

    • 1651 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Walden Experience

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages

    What I learned from this wonderful experience was not to take nature or anything in general for granted. Also, I did not write all of my thoughts down that I had because that would take up more than eight pages, but I really thought about social media because I was away from it. Social media was like my comfort and I cared about it so much. For example, I always wanted so many likes on my posts on Facebook and Instagram. During the Walden experience, it made me change my mind and it made me ask myself why?…

    • 640 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In short, the value of the (traditional) fairy tale lies in its unique ability to grant credibility to the child’s predicaments while, at the same time, promoting self-confidence in the child (7). In this manner of addressing and alleviating universal childhood fears, traditional fairy tales play a critical role in childhood development. One thing children, who are small and somewhat helpless, fear is that they will always be at a disadvantage. Fairy tales teach children that even a situation that seems desperate can improve.…

    • 1155 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Henry David Thoreau wrote in a time of change and ages past. Every era is opposed to the ones preceding and succeeding itself, but the Romantics were truly a group who hearkened to an old tune; one of integrated civilization and nature in medieval times. When he wrote Walden, Thoreau wrote about his own experiences in the natural world and how it changed him. In his writing, Thoreau explains why one should live deliberately. He actively argues to convince the reader to do so.…

    • 1360 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Fairy Tales are an important means used to teach life’s basic truths to children. These stories contain deep moral beliefs that sculpt basic understanding of right and wrong for society. Throughout time they have been adapted to a more child friendly form, even so that the film industry now bases child-oriented movies on classic fairy tales. Fairy tales, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, appeal to a sense of romance, adventure, and the fight between good and evil. Society supports retelling the fairy tales because they support traditional moral values society desires its children to learn.…

    • 1291 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Should fairy tales be read to children? This is a intriguing topic that is widely cogitated by people around the world,old and young. “The Case Against Fairytales” and “10 Reasons Why Kids need to Read Non-Disney Fairy Tales” by Arielle Schussler and Melissa Taylor respectively illustrate the negative and positive effects of fairy tales for children. Fairy tales, are they commendable, or pernicious? I argue that they are essential to a child’s everyday life, worthy of the praise that I think they deserve.…

    • 755 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Anthropocentric Nature Writing in the “Introduction” to Walden Bill McKibben’s “Introductin” to Walden, telling of a backpacking trip into the New York Adirondacks, is a great example of nature writing. Nature writing has a tendency to be anthropocentric, fueling consumerism in its readers. By contrast, the hallmarks of environmental writing are an attempt to create an awareness for issues concerning the environment in a biocentric point of view and to convey the detrimental effects of humanity’s impact on the world. The first four paragraphs of Bill McKibben’s “Introduction” to Walden exemplify nature writing in many aspects, chiefly thorough an anthropocentric focus throughout the passage which negates any attempts at environmental writing.…

    • 819 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    My Reading Experience

    • 1190 Words
    • 5 Pages

    It’s exciting plot and meaningful themes led me to see reading in a whole new light. I realized that fiction is not only useful for entertainment, but also for learning about the world. With this revolutionary state of mind, I sought out books such as Lord of the Flies and 1984. Just last year, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which once again proved to me that novels are nearly as useful for learning about the world and developing one’s character as nonfiction books. With this new perspective in mind, I am excited to discover more books to once again captivate me and consume my…

    • 1190 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays