When No One Is Looking

"Research suggests that rewards may work in the short term but have damaging effects in the long term." - NYTimes, March 3rd, 2009. (Via Mindhacks.)

This certainly doesn't need to be repeated by me, but it's one of my pet peeves about the way some parents approach education, and I'm in a mood, so...

I understand - you want your child to get good grades. You don't want the exuberance of youth to deprive Little Johnny of opportunities for good schools and scholarships in the future. That is admirable, to a point. You beg, plead, and cajole, but your exasperating offspring just doesn't seem focused on getting good grades. You are tempted to bribe your spawn, because you remember how well bribery worked when s/he was younger.

Let me just say - DON'T DO IT!

Your child's education does not stop when s/he leaves school. Adulthood is filled with many, many trials - trials that will be much easier to endure if your child has the desire to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge on his/her own, to read for pleasure and personal growth, and to develop and pursue his/her intrinsic interests in the absence of an immediate reward. Success comes down to what you are willing to do when no one is looking.

Let me also add a plea as a teacher - it is so much more enjoyable to teach someone who wants to learn! Someone who is naturally curious. A teacher can encourage a child's curiosity and use it as a tool to help them learn, but this task becomes harder when learning is overshadowed by the presence of performance incentives, because at least part of the child's awareness is always fixed on the incentive. (Ditto for teaching students who are just interested in passing a test.) At some point one might even argue that teaching students motivated by performance incentives ceases to be 'teaching' in the best sense of the word. This gets depressing for teachers.

So, how do you make your child into this wonderful machine that is driven by an intrinsic desire to learn?

“We’re going to have to parent better, and turn off the television set, and put the video games away, and instill a sense of excellence in our children, and that’s going to take some time.” - attributed to Barack Obama.

And it's got to start before they are in school. I'm on the verge of a full-blown rant, which is not really how I wanted to start the day, so I'll stop for the moment.