Early Life
Skinner was born on February 14, 1925, in Oakland, California. His father, John James Skinner was a pharmacologist and his mother, Eunice Engle Skinner, taught music and became the director of music education for the Berkeley school system. Skinner spent two years at Deep Springs College, a small college founded to educate small cohorts of young men into the life of the mind in a self-sufficient, disciplined manner. After Deep Springs, he joined the Navy V-12 Program in 1943, then attended the U.S. Navy Oriental Language School for 18 months at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he studied Chinese. In 1946, Skinner headed for Cornell University to complete his B.A. degree. He graduated in the following year with his B.A. (with distinction) in Far Eastern studies, and remained there for his Ph.D. in anthropology (1954) under the supervision of Lauriston Sharp.
Read more about this topic: G. William Skinner
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)