The problem with praise

My mom recently directed me to an article at the Natural Child Project website, suggesting that using rewards and praise in education is not all it's cracked up to be. The author points out that rewards, like punishments, are based in part on behavioralist theories, and the benefits of using rewards to control or to teach have been demonstrated in pigeons, dogs, and rats. But of course, to quote the article, "We are not concerned with rodents’ developing self-esteem, their sense of autonomy or independence, nor do we give a hoot whether the rat will get interested in trying bigger and better mazes of it’s own accord, long after we stop rewarding it with little food pellets."

Rewards and praise may have unintended consequences, since they tend to promote doing the minimum work required to attain the reward.

Contrary to popular myth, there are many studies showing that when children expect or anticipate rewards, they perform more poorly. One study found that students’ performance was undermined when offered money for better marks. A number of American and Israeli studies show that reward systems suppress students’ creativity, and generally impoverish the quality of their work. Rewards can kill creativity, because they discourage risk-taking. When children are hooked on getting a reward, they tend to avoid challenges, to "play it safe". They prefer to do the minimum required to get that prize.

Here is a good illustration of why we made the mistake of believing in rewards, based on benefits that appear on the surface. When an American fast-food company offered food prizes to children for every book they read, reading rates soared. This certainly looked encouraging - at first glance. On closer inspection, however, it was demonstrated that the children were selecting shorter books, and that their comprehension test-scores plummeted. They were reading for junk-food, rather than for the intrinsic enjoyment of reading. Meanwhile, reading outside school (the unrewarded situation) dropped off.

I can attest to these effects from personal experience. My high school days were spent in recalculating percentages and averages so that I could determine the minimal work necessary to attain an A. If I could blow off a homework assignment, I did so. I don't think I missed much by blowing off high school work, but it was a bad strategy to take into college.

Another author points out the harm done by indiscriminate praise, in this article in Mothering magazine. She points out that too much praise in the classroom renders praise worthless, and that praising all children equally prevents them from understanding their personal strengths. Further, their attention is directed away from the real rewards and consequences of their efforts, to an artificial reward bestowed by someone else. As she puts it,

We grow tomatoes in our garden. If I water the seedlings, I am rewarded positively by the growth of healthy plants.... All summer, I will harvest a crop of delicious homegrown tomatoes, not "Good work in GARDENING" certificates.

Another good article cites a book titled Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn; here is a bit from Kohn's book:

Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave.

I've been thinking about the following: imagine if every time you went to say "Good job!" or "Well done!" you substituted the words "I approve"? I think that illustrates the condescension hidden in praise.

Of course, I do praise my daughter. I don't tend to praise her personally, but I make positive comments about drawings or tasks she's accomplished. Probably what I say most often is "Wow!" She solicits my praise (as in "Mom! I found 15 states that time!"), for one thing, and after all she is not yet 5. But for an older child, I am beginning to see how peppering them with praise can be a bit demeaning, unless the child asks for your opinion.

Fostering a dependency on adult approval does have consequences, as the last article points out:

One study Kohn cites found that students whose teachers praise them heavily demonstrated less task persistence (i.e., diminished intrinsic motivation) and also were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice, and were less likely to take the initiative to share their ideas with other students. Praise was also a factor contributing to a tendency to back off from an idea they had put forward as soon as an adult disagreed with them.

A child who receives praise, rewards, and constant evaluation through testing and grading will tend to remain dependent on an authority to bestow a positive judgment. The academically successful child could grow up with the opposite of self-esteem-- we could call it other-esteem. Nor can I see how the current school system fosters intrinsic joy in learning or accomplishing tasks. And forget about independence, autonomy, and critical thinking. Too much "positive reinforcement" does not truly reinforce the individual; it engenders dependence.

To keep this in the context of the purpose of mass schooling, I'll end with a bit of historical context by John Gatto.

In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."