Dom <DRosa@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>"Setting up a system of bribes and bounties for both students and
>teachers might help in the short run," said Bob Schaeffer, public
>education director of FairTest, a national center for fair and open
>testing based in Cambridge, Mass. "But what happens when kids get to
>college, and they're not paid for their grades?"
a) they are adults and they can live with the consequences, since by
then they are paying a significant chunk of their own education costs.
b) being close to the terminus of their formal education, they can
realize the truth that they ARE being paid for their grades, in the
form of better op****tunities for careers or grad school.
>Alfie Kohn, author of "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold
>Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes," described
>Project Opening Doors as "an almost guaranteed bad technique, relying
>on crude behaviorist psychology, married to a terrible goal, which is
>about passing bad tests."
Better to pass a bad test, than to not challenge yourself in any way,
and not pass any tests.
>"It's superficial from the get-go," he said. "You do something in
>order for you to get the goodie, and that devalues the act itself."
Guess what - that is true of most of life. Most people work at their
jobs to get a paycheck. They go to school to get grades and the
ticket to get the job with the higher paycheck. Real life has become
much more a matter of economics than was apparent a while back (it
probably was just as much the case back then, but when only the elite
and wealthy went to college, there was a possibility of a non-monetary
reward (academic esteem) outweighing money as a motivator. It's still
true for a few, but not for the majority of the academic marketplace,
which isn't buying what educational purists are selling.
lojbab
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