Up: [[Thinking]] Created: 20250-01-09 [[Challenge and Conflict are Essential to Change and Learning]] If we don’t have challenges, we lose the tension and the striving that lets us keep improving. As much as we might some days yearn for the simple life of B.F. Skinner’s rats, ![[CartoonStock Skinner rats.jpg|400]] we don’t really want that. Skinner’s behaviourism theory says we learn through interaction with our environment. We’re exposed to some kind of stimulus, which elicits a response from us, and then the response is reinforced through either reward or punishment. Over time, this conditioning shapes our behaviour. Behaviourism was huge in the 60s and early 70s and it’s still the default position for some teachers. The problem, as [[Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]] points out through his theory of [[Flow]] is that a behaviourism approach to life *misses most of what it means to be human.* We need [[Hard Fun]].