There’s a small sequence in the movie Taare Zameen Par where the mother gets busy at an unearthly hour making breakfast for the father, the kid and then of course the little one. And every time I recall those set of scenes I get a memory jog about what I see around me every day. Kids these days seem to be running from one school to another, changing bags and uniforms along the way trying to keep up with each other in a mad, mad race of one-upmanship.
Pradeepto has a small blog entry about “alternative education”. We were talking about it on the very day the programme was aired on TV but not everything that’s there in the blog was being talked about.
The most significant problem with the issue is that the kids are generally pushed into activities by their parents because “co-curricular activities are nice” and since they don’t really like these karate-swimming-tennis-what_not classes – they are rewarded each time they do attend or participate in them.
If the hassled parents of today think that rewards are a good way to enforce behaviour change – I’d say they are dead wrong.
Rewards are a mistake. And a big one.
Rewards don’t really bring about behaviour change. What they end up doing is ensuring that a repetitive pattern of behaviour is put in place so as to minimize the chances of losing out on the rewards. Ergo, the kids don’t do things that would ensure that they don’t get rewards. And since they are being rewarded for something they might not be enjoying – the very act of rewards+praise drains away the intrinsic motivation for taking interest in the activity. There is the additional bit about disparity of rewards causing problems in the social / peer circle of the kids.
The method of in-your-face rewards to enforce behaviour is thus linked with the threat of withdrawal of the reward if the outcome is not desirable. In a way, the linking of rewards with outcome limit the desire of the kids to explore (and take a few learning risks here and there). Rewards are very disruptive. There have been a few studies done on rewards and motivation in the workplace and the general conclusions haven’t been very pleasant. There’s no reason to believe that rewarding kids for something they might not enjoy doing is going to bring about any different result.
It is kind of sad to see that there aren’t more of the schools which focus on an “alternative” way to teach. The current system of education only demands that the kids can regurgitate the facts – not learn from what is there in the text books. It is not that there are brilliant (and not limiting that word to the academic sense only) kids. But they are there “in spite of the system” and not “because of the system”. And that is what is a really bad sign.