Punished by rewards: Part II

One of the points Kohn makes about behavior modification techniques is that they reinforce the power and status difference between the person handing out rewards or punishments and the person being controlled. He writes (p.28):

If you doubt that rewarding someone emphasizes the rewarder's position of greater power, imagine that you have given your next-door neighbor a ride downtown, or some help moving a piece of furniture, and that he then offers you five dollars for your trouble. If you feel insulted by the gesture, consider why this should be, what the payment implies.

This is also something to consider when praising one's children. When it happens spontaneously, and you say "Wow, that's a great cat you drew!" because you're truly surprised and pleased, I can't see why anyone would object. It's an authentic and natural comment. But if you get into the habit (I've been there myself for periods of time) of saying "Good job!" every 5 or 10 minutes, consider what it would sound like if instead you said "I approve!" At some point it becomes demeaning to the child and implies they are, and perhaps should be, working constantly to impress and please you.

Kohn also argues that while behaviorists may claim their techniques are value-neutral and apolitical, in fact rewards and punishments invariably reinforce the current power structure, and are thus inherently conservative. In this case, one of the founders of behaviorism, John Watson, admitted as much, as quoted on p. 29:

[We] are constantly manipulating stimuli, dangling this, that, and the other combination in front of the human being in order to determine the reactions they will bring forth -- hoping that the reaction will be "in line with progress," "desirable," "good." (And society really means by "desirable," "good," "in line with progress," reactions that will not disturb its recognized and established traditional order of things.)

Kohn also quotes two psychologists who reviewed behavior modification programs in schools, who concluded that these systems "have used their procedures to serve the goals and values of the existing school system." I guess this is obvious, but as Kohn says, such programs are always sold to parents and teachers as benefitting the students, not the easier administration and management of the school or classroom. That a token reward system increases the power of the teacher over her students is usually not considered, nor what this might do, in turn, to erode a child's self-reliance, self-discipline, or personal responsibility. The question more likely to be asked is "And did it increase test scores?" Thus the political side to the carrot and stick system goes unaddressed.

Kohn goes on (p. 30):

While it may seem that reward-and-punishment strategies are inherently neutral, that any sort of behavior could, in principle, by encouraged or discouraged, this is not completely true. If it were, the fact that these strategies are invariably used to promote order and obedience would have to be explained as a remarkable coincidence.

More realistically, we must acknowledge that because pop behaviorism is fundamentally a means of controlling people, it is by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants. Rewarding people for making changes in the existing order (which might include the very order that allows some individuals to be controllers and others controlled) is not merely unlikely but a contradiction in terms. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," as one writer put it.

The problem is that with children, we need them to throw off the existing order at some point. We need them to grow up to be self-reliant and self-disciplined, to be personally responsible and able to investigate and learn all on their own. Yet the behaviorism in schools is antithetical to this goal. I'll end with an excerpt from a speech by John Gatto which makes this very point, and I find it interesting that the main reward bestowed upon students, in his opinion, is simply the teacher's attention.

The American economy depends on schooling us that status is purchased and others run our lives. We learn [in school] that sources of joy and accomplishment are external, that the contentment comes with the possessions, seldom from within.... Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy, even dangerous.... [School] ambushes natural intuition, faith, and love of adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational procedure and rational management.

About a month ago, the New York Times sent a reporter to three daycare centers.... [A]ccording to the reporter, each gave only token personal attention to individual kids, because mathematically no more than that was possible. Communication was by cheerful admonitions like "Don't do that Wilma" or to-whom-it-may-concern statements like "It's line-up time!". Workers saw their goals more as managing children than interacting with them. Managing children is what professional childcare is about in America. Schools are part of the professional child care empire and education has nothing whatsoever to do with it....

The U.C.L.A. study done recently of a 1000 public schools found that the teachers averaged 7 minutes daily in personal exchanges with students. Divided among 30 kids, that is a total of 14 seconds each. The constant scrambling for attention and status in the close confines of the classroom, where those are only officially conferred by an adult who lacks both the time or the information to be fair, teaches us to dislike and distrust each other. This continuous auction of favors, has something to do with our anger, and our inability to be honest or responsible, even as grown-ups. Yet, ironically, irresponsibility serves the management ideal much better than decent behavior ever could. It demands close management, it explains all those lawyers, all those courts, all those policemen and all those schools. Now either we are structurally undependable, necessitating constant policing, or somehow we have been robbed of our ability to become responsible.

Consider the strange possibility that we have been deliberately taught to be irresponsible and to dislike each other for some good purpose. I am not being sarcastic or even cynical. I spent 19 years as a student, and 30 more as a school teacher and in all that time I was seldom asked to be responsible, unless you mistake obedience and responsibility for the same thing, which they certainly are not. Whether student or teacher, I gave unreflective obedience to strangers for 49 years. If that isn't a recipe for irresponsibility then nothing is. In school your payoff comes from giving up your personal responsibility, just doing what you're told by strangers even if that violates the core principles of your household. There isn't any way to grow up in school, school won't let you.

As I watched it happen, it takes three years to break a kid, 3 years confined to an environment of emotional neediness, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games; these work much better than angry words and punishment.... Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children, toadies, school stoolies, little people sunk into chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose, just like caged rats, pressing a bar for sustenance, who develop eccentric mannerisms on a periodic reinforcement schedule....