178.
Paying Children To Learn: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Paying
Children To Learn
As it turned out, my own period of
behaviorist training came back to haunt me thirty years later as garlic sausage eaten after midnight returns
the next afternoon to avenge being
chewed. In 1989, to my delight, I secured a
substantial cash grant from a
small foundation to pay kids for
what heretofore they had been doing in my class for free. Does that sound like a good idea to you? I
guess it did to me, I'm ashamed to say.
Wouldn't you imagine that after
twenty-eight years of increasingly successful classroom practice I might have known better? But
then if we were perfect, who would eat garlic sausage after midnight? The great irony is that after a long
teaching career, I always made it
a major point of instruction to actively teach disrespect for bribes and
grades. I never gave gold stars. I
never gave overt praise, because I believe without question that learning is its own reward. Nothing ever
happened in my experience with kids to change my mind about that. Soaping kids, as street children called it then,
always struck me as a nasty,
self-serving tactic. Addicting people to praise as a motivator puts them
on a slippery slope toward a
lifetime of fear and exploitation, always looking for some expert to approve of them.
Let me set the stage for the
abandonment of my own principles. Take a large sum of money, which for dramatic purposes, I converted into fifty
and one hundred dollar bills. Add
the money to a limited number of kids, many of them dirt poor, some having
never eaten off a tablecloth, one
who was living on the street in an abandoned car. None of the victims had much
experience with pocket money beyond a dollar or two. Is this the classic capitalist tension out of which
a sawbuck or a C-note should produce beautiful music?
Now overlook my supercilious
characterization. See the kids beneath their shabby clothing and rude manners as quick, intelligent beings, more
aware of connections than any
child development theory knows how to explain. Here were kids already
doing prodigies of real
intellectual work, not what the curriculum manual called for, of course, but what I, in my willful, outlaw way
had set out for them. The board of education saw a roomful of ghetto kids, but I knew better, having decided
years before that the bell curve
was an instrument of deceit, one rich with subleties, some of them unfathomable,
but propaganda all the same.
So there I was with all this money,
accountable to nobody for its use but myself. Plenty for everyone. How to spend it? Using all the lore acquired
long ago at Columbia's Psychology
Department, I set up reinforcement schedules to hook the kids to cash, beginning continuously — paying off at
every try — then changing to periodic schedules after the victim was in the net, and finally shifting to
aperiodic reinforcements so the
learning would dig deep and last. >From thorough personal familiarity
with each kid and a data bank to
boot, I had no doubt that the activities I selected would be intrinsically interesting anyway, so the financial
incentives would only intensify student interest. What a surprise I got!
Instead of becoming a
model experiment proving the power of market incentives, disaster occurred. Quality in work dropped
noticeably, interest lessened markedly. In everything but the money, that is. And yet even enthusiasm for that
tailed off after the first few
payments; greed remained but delight disappeared.
All this performance loss was
accompanied by the growth of disturbing personal behavior — kids who once liked each other now tried to
sabotage each other's work. The only
rational reason I could conceive for this was an unconscious attempt to keep
the pool of available cash as
large as possible. Nor was that the end of the strange behavior the addition of cash incentives caused
in my classes. Now kids began to do as little as possible to achieve a payout where once they had striven for
a standard of excellence. Large
zones of deceptive practice appeared, to the degree I could no longer trust
data presented, because it so
frequently was made out of whole cloth.
Like Margaret Mead's South Sea sexual fantasies,
E.L. Burtt's fabulous imaginary twin
data, Dr. Kinsey's bogus sexual statistics, or Sigmund Freud's
counterfeit narratives of hysteria
and dream, 14 like the amazing discovery of the mysterious bone which led to
the "proof of Piltdown Man
having been discovered by none other than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who, after the fraud was
exploded, refused to discuss his lucky find ever again), 15 my children, it seemed, were able to discern how
the academic game is played or,
perhaps more accurately, they figured out the professional game which is about
fame and fortune much more than
any service to mankind. The little entrepreneurs were telling me what they thought I wanted to
hear!
In other unnerving
trends, losers began to peach on winners, reporting their friends had cheated through falsification of data
or otherwise had unfairly acquired prizes. Suddenly I was faced with an epidemic of kids ratting on each other.
One day I just got sick of it. I
confessed to following an animal-training program in launching the
incentives. Then I inventoried the
remaining money, still thousands of dollars, and passed it out in equal shares at the top of the second floor
stairs facing Amsterdam Avenue. I instructed the kids to sneak out the back door one at a time to avoid
detection, then run like the wind
with their loot until they got home.
How they spent their
unearned money was no business of mine, I told them, but from that day forward there would be no rewards
as long as I was their teacher. And so ended my own brief romance with empty-child pedagogy.
14.'"When
you come to understand the absolute necessity of scientific fraud, whether
unintentional or deliberate, to
the social and economic orders we have allowed to invest out lives, it is not
so surprising to find the long
catalogue of deceits, dishonesties, and outright fantasies which infect the
worlds of science and their
intersection with the worlds of politics, commerce, and social class. The
management of our society requires
a stupefying succession of miracles to retain its grip on things, whether real
miracles or bogus ones is utterly
immaterial. To Mead, Burtt, Kinsey, Freud, and de Chardin, might be added the
recent Nobel laureate James
Watson, double-helix co-discoverer. Watson's fraud lies in his presumption
that having solved one of the
infinite puzzles of nature, he is qualified to give expert opinion on its uses.
As The Nation magazine reported on
April 7, 2003, Watson is an energetic advocate of re-engineering the human genetic germline. In a British
documentary film, Watson is shown declaring that genetic expertise should be used to rid the world of
"stupid" children. And "ugly" girls! It is only necessary to
recall the time when corporate
science presented the world with DDT as a way to rid the world of stupid and
ugly bugs, and the horrifying
aftermath of that exercise in problem-solving, to reflect that we might be
better off ridding the world of
Watsons and keeping our stupid kids and ugly girls.
l5 One of the most amazing deceptive
practices relating to science has been the successful concealment, by the managers of science and science
teaching, of the strong religious component shared by many of the greatest names in science: Copernicus,
Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin and many more. Even Galileo had no doubt about his
faith in God, only in the established church's interpretation of His will. Newton's Principia is unambiguous
on this matter, saying "He must be blind who. ..cannot see the infinite wisdom and goodness of [the]
Almighty Creator and he must be mad, or senseless, who refused to acknowledge [Him]. A. P. French quotes Albert
Einstein in his Einstein: A Centenaiy Volume (1979) on the matter this
way: You will hardly find
one among the pro founder sort of scientific minds without a religious feeling...., rapturous amazement of the
natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic
thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding
principle of his life and work. It is beyond questions closely akin to that which has possessed the religious
geniuses of all ages. But
neither Newton or Einstein cut the mustard, where their spirituality might
raise embarrassing questions among
shoolchildren. School science is almost purely about lifeless mechanics. In the
next chapter we'll see why that
happened.
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