G's response

Interesting thoughts you've left. Here are few points of clarification about "my position" vis a vis the Chomsky versus Skinner debate:
As you've tumbled, there is much more to this than meets the eye, but from an instructors perspective it's a great place to start and it provides a handy schematic narrative for understanding a dauntingly complex set of shifting ideas. Making it a struggle between the forces of good and evil is a seductive if overly hyperbolic approach. Eveeryone likes to take a position and of the two, these days, the Chomskian looks so much more resonable almost forty years later.
I'm sure that neither Skinner nor Chomsky managed to get it right, but that's how scientific inquiry goes: one reliable accepted wisdom is suddenlty the emperor without the clothes and now there's a new kid in town and everyone flocks to touch his mantle. That's pretty much how it was for Chomsky, even though his linguistics has fallen to the wayside somewhat and been undermined by new ideas.
Despite the problems with Chomsky (the insistence on making language a science as amenable to ineluctable laws as physics), his problems are not nearly as profound, intellectually as Skinner's. I think Vygotsky's work might be described as Skinner with more sense of "I" and the creative human impulse. Then there's MK Halliday, the English linguist single handedly creating modern functionalism (form always follows function).
Lingusistics was dominated until recently by very formalist approaches to language study. Of the two - Chomsky and Halliday - the latter offers much more to teachers because he provides 9by extension) insights into the purposes of language - the functions - which, from an educational standpoint, is a much more useful approach.
I'd like to bring Halliday's work more to the forefront of 5030 but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
I also think you'd really enjoy this new book which captures the essence of everything that's going wrong for Chomsky's legacy these days: it's Christine Kenneally's book "The First Word". i can't remember the last time i enjoyed a linguistics book more. Also, for a brilliant peek into the history of Chomsky's hegemonic control of modern linguistics, read "The Linguistics Wars" by Randy Allen Harris. It gives you all the dope on who kicked whom and what all the original fuss was about. it turns out that Chomsky was a very jealous god indeed.