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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