MAKING SENSE OF SCHOOLING: are teachers paying with funny money?
Gary
K. Clabaugh
Emeritus
Professor of Education
LaSalle
University
Public
schooling encourages solemnity but discourages seriousness. Most of what is
said is a stew of wishful thinking seasoned with outright lies. So let’s
be novel and take a rational approach governed by simple truths.
Let's begin by acknowledging that people respond to incentives. If behavior is rewarded, people will do more of it and more intensely. If behavior is costly, people
will do less of it.
Now
let’s consider grades. Some youngsters regard good grades as rewarding in and
of themselves. Others see them as valuable
because, in part, they please their parents. Still others see them as means to other ends
such as a scholarship or admission to a favorite school. In any case youngsters who regard grades as valuable will work to achieve them.
But
some youngsters regard grades as valueless. They see no connection between
them and any future they imagine for themselves. Also some parents could care
less about their children’s grades. (Read Claude Brown’s biography, Man Child
in the Promised Land, for a sad real life account.) That’s a real turnoff. Besides,
getting good grades might antagonize their peers. So it makes more sense to raise
hell.
So
what rewards can a teacher offer that will make this type of student want to learn
and do it more intensely? Well there is teacher praise; but that’ generally
appeals to kids who already care about grades. Also, they could develop a
subsidiary economy where they buy, at their own expense of course, things most
kids would like to have and award them for achievement. That works, but it is
expensive and some regard it as bribery.
How
about making disinterest or outright opposition more costly? Corporal
punishment was used for centuries as motivation, for instance. An ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphic even reads, “Learning comes with blood.” But modern
pedagogues are not only forbidden to use corporal punishment as motivation,
they are assured it won’t work.
So
what are teachers left with? A sizable, sometimes paralyzing, number of kids
who care less about grades and cannot be motivated or threatened with
anything else that they find convincing. The net result is classrooms with students,
perhaps many students, who are impossible to teach because they utterly lack
motivation. Of course, that means all kinds of trouble.
What
it to be done? Not much. Presently the strategy is to just blame it on the
teachers. That’s wholly unfair, but it works pretty well.
For
articles related to this topic try the site search at www.newfoundations.com.
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