What you are taught to do vs. what you want to do

I just wrote a comment to Sarah's post below in which I stated, "When what you are taught to do is put up against what you want to do, what you are taught to do will win every time." This in many ways is the essence of what Skinner is talking about. It really doesn't matter in life what you want to do - the idea that you have free will is an illusion. We always wind up doing those things that we are taught to do, even if we don't see personal meaning, or even our own self-interest in the act. But what we are taught to do is complex, and becomes more complex as we go from Skinner to Bandura. We are taught by society, and again not what society says it wants to teach us, but what it does teach us through the reinforcements that we receive in response to our freely emitted activities.

Sarah uses the example of the child on the mat during circle time. The child does not behave, does not take turns, does not do any of the things the teacher desires. This frustrates the teacher who tried to get the child to cognitively understand why it is better to do these things, to behave in circle time. This is an attempt to get at the internal motivation that Sarah talks about. We say though the child can only do this if he is self-regulated - but in essence that is saying the child has the cognitive architectures that are allowing him to assimilate these ideas. But this is suggesting two things, first that this is an internal function, and second that the child's activities are basically linear in nature - "If I do A I will achieve B." I think Skinner would say that neither of these is true.

The child instead is reacting based on reinforcement received when engaging in similar activities. One of the big issues here is what exactly is reinforcement for the child, because don't we have to personalize reinforcement to some degree. Perhaps any type of attention or reaction is a form of reinforcement to a child who wants to be noticed. So the talk the teacher gives the acting out child becomes a positive reinforcement for a child to act out and get attention.