Today's questions

Things Anya asked me today:

• How do magicians do the rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick?
• How many moons does Venus have?
• How come Mercury and Venus don't have any moons?
• Is our planet ever going to get sucked into the sun?
• How big is our moon? (She guessed "Bigger than our house.")
• What are asteroids?
• What's a growth spurt?
• Where do the blue ladybugs live?
• How far is it to Hawaii?
• How do you tell male ladybugs from female ladybugs?
• Where can we find aphids?
• Would our ladybugs (current count: 21, living in a pickle jar) mate if we gave them aphids?
  
• Does "ladybug" have a silent 'e' in it? (the 'a' says its name, after all...)
• Why are ladybugs diurnal?
• What do Daddy Long-Legs eat?
• What do pillbugs (roly-polys) eat?
• What happens to a roly-poly if it dries out?
• What's the recipe for Play-Doh?
• How come some grass grows taller than other grass?
• How tall does the tallest grass grow?
• Do prairie dogs live on the prairie?
• How come one of our guitars is louder than the other guitar?
• How do you play a C note on the guitar?
• How do you play Old McDonald on the guitar?
• How does the thermostat work?
• If light is the fastest thing ever than how come it takes a second for the kitchen light to turn on? (It's fluorescent....)
  
• Are fairies real?
• How many seconds is two minutes?
• How many seconds is three minutes?
• How slow does a turtle move?
• How slow does a tree sloth move?
• What's the fastest animal?
• Can I (Anya) run faster than a chipmunk?
• What does this sound mean (a telephone busy signal)?
• How come some cheese is stinkier than other cheese?
• How does popcorn pop?
• How many people live on the whole Earth?
• Why don't any people live at the South Pole?
• How come my (electronic, LeapFrog) globe doesn't say "population 1" at the North Pole?

Mind you, this is just what I can remember, sitting here and trying to recall as of 4pm. There are also many observations that she wants me to reaffirm, as in: "That red spot on Jupiter is a storm bigger than our whole PLANET, right Mom?" I didn't count those, and there are just as many of those as actual questions. Nor did I count lengthy discussions such as how orbiting works, the phases of the moon, or the seasons. Nor the time spent finding ladybug images on Google. Nor the time spent practicing little song bits on her guitar. Nor did I count the things I volunteered, like that groups of insects have different names, like coleoptera are beetles, lepidoptera are moths and butterflies, and hymenoptera are social insects like bees, wasps, and ants. The Latin names are boring, but we were looking through a long index of bug pics listed by Latin names, and it was actually useful in that context.

And then there was Tristan: colors, shapes, vehicles, parts of the face, practicing going down the stairs, books, puzzles, dancing, crayon drawing, Baby Einstein videos, and the endless requests for snacks. He was eating grapes today while Anya had the lid off the ladybug jar, and he held up a grape and said "bug." I was pretty thrilled with that, and of course cut the grape in half and stuck it in there, then helped him see that the bugs were indeed eating it within minutes.

I just don't think we have time for a curriculum-- I'm too busy helping my kids learn stuff as it is.

And this was a day I supposedly devoted to housework! Criminy, no wonder I'm so often exhausted....

The Pledge

This is a photograph of American students saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Up until 1942, this was the salute given during the Pledge. Pretty startling, no?

The Pledge (and its original salute) were created in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, whose political beliefs lay somewhere between socialism and communism. (His cousin Edward Bellamy wrote a best-selling futuristic novel describing a communist utopia. The novel was called Looking Backward, and I can see why it outsold almost every other book of its time: it involved strict management of the entire population by the State, which was a very popular idea around the turn of the century.) Francis Bellamy may have been a progressive socialist concerned with equality and other noble pursuits, but he also believed this could be attained through a more powerful, controlling government. I guess the author's motivations don't matter much, since the Pledge is merely one long sentence, but I think it gives some cultural context.

The Pledge was enthusiastically adopted by the National Education Association and local school boards in the years that followed, often along with a flag-raising ceremony. For a time in the 1940s, the Pledge was legally compulsory. In 1940 the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that even Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion forbids them from swearing allegiance to any lesser power than God, would be forced to recite the Pledge in school. However, the court promptly reversed itself in 1943, ruling that no school could compel students to recite the Pledge due to free speech protections.

The "under God" portion of the Pledge was added in 1954 in order to distinguish our Pledge from the communist Soviet Pledge, which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. What exactly is the message? "Sure, we have our own daily loyalty oath just like them, but at least we're not godless fascists"? Why not just drop the whole silly thing?

The main concrete effect of the Pledge is to socialize children that patriotism is normal; lack of patriotism is aberrant. Furthermore, patriotism is to be expressed through communist-like spoken loyalty oaths and militaristic salutes, not through expression of freedom of speech (talk about ironic). It may not seem like a big deal, when it's just a short 30-second ritual and kids don't even consider the meaning of the words most of the time, but I consider it both an anachronism and another example of school's hostility toward autonomy.

UPDATE: There's some more information about the history of the Pledge here, at my mom's blog.

The more things change....

From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, chapter five:

One of Munsterberg’s favorite disciples, Lillian Wald, became a powerful advocate of medical incursions into public schools. The famous progressive social reformer wrote in 1905: "It is difficult to place a limit upon the service which medical inspection should perform," continuing, "Is it not logical to conclude that physical development...should so far as possible be demanded?" One year later, immigrant public schools in Manhattan began performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without notifying parents. The New York Times (June 29, 1906) reported that "Frantic Italians" —- many armed with stilettos -— "stormed" three schools, attacking teachers and dragging children from [their] clutches....

From the legal advocacy group The Rutherford Institute, July 30, 2000:

Strangers entered two different elementary schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma on two separate occasions. They forcibly removed the clothes from numerous children between the ages of three and five—over their cries of fear and desperate attempts to resist—and proceeded to probe the genitals of the now-nude children.

. . .

The nurses conducted their exams over the protests of the children, with some crying for their mothers. Still others, intimidated and filled with fear, even attempted to resist physically. Their parents did not know that the exams were scheduled and had not given their consent. So there was no way they could have known the terror their children were enduring during their school day.

The nurses stretched the children out on a floor mat, on top of a school desk, and forcibly removed their clothes. Although the nurses were not even wearing hygienic gloves, they pressed and probed the children’s genitals and took blood samples. The exams were conducted en masse—the children endured these humiliations in front of one other, amidst the panic, crying and fear.

When confronted about the situation, the Head Start director responsible for the exams said that he didn’t think there was anything strange or unusual about the physicals....

. . .

Thirteen families have now filed a lawsuit against Head Start, the nurses involved, the county health department and the school district. The parents allege violations of their privacy, emotional and mental distress of their children and other constitutional claims.

And in Pennsylvania, several years back:

The Washington Times (Genital Exams at School Irk Parents, A1 4/27/96) reports that 50 [actually 59] sixth-grade girls at a public school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania were forced to undergo "genital examinations" in violation of the expressed will of the girls and without the notification of parents.

Katie Tucker, the mother of one of the girl's who was violated, tells the story: "[After being marched into the nurses office] they were told they needed to take off their clothes and just leave their underwear on. They were standing in line, perfectly embarrassed, and then they found out the doctor was doing genital exams.

"The girls were scared. They were crying and trying to run out of the door, but one of the nurses was blocking the door so they couldn't leave.

"My daughter told the other nurse that 'My mother wouldn't like this. I want to call her.' And they said 'No.' And my daughter said, 'I don't want this test done.' And the nurse said 'Too bad.'

"[The physician] put the girls in a room and had them lie down on a table, spread-eagled, with nothing covering them...." The inspection was supposedly for genital warts and lesions. Mrs. Tucker continues, "The girls had no idea what they were doing. The doctor didn't talk to them. She just did the genital exam and didn't say one word. All my daughter could do was stare up at the ceiling. And it hurt. It still hurts."

School officials in the Pennsylvania case refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing and were supported by other educators:

The Pennsylvania branch of the National Education Association (NEA) supports the actions of Dr. Vahanvaty, the supervising school nurses, and the requirement of an in-school genital exam. Teachers wore blue ribbons to demonstrate their support of the exam. The district and state police agreed with Dr. Vahanvaty's statement that she acted within professional and state guidelines.

The East Stroudsburg School Board approved of the examination. A motion to give children the right to refuse examinations below the waist was defeated 8 to 1.

These educators were, however, clearly in the wrong:

SCRANTON, PA -- U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ruled on July 27 that the East Stroudsburg School District violated the Fourth Amendment rights of 59 6th grade girls who were given genital exams without parental consent in 1996. The exams occurred at the J.T. Lambert Middle School. The judge ruled that the exams constituted "unreasonable searches," and said he "could not identify a compelling government reason to examine the genitals."

Two days later, the jury returned a verdict against the district, awarding a total of $60,000 in damages, or $7,500 for each of the eight student plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The jury did not award damages to the parents. The physician who performed the exams reached an out-of-court settlement [reportedly for $25,000 per student] with the girls families.

In addition to this we have, in essence, the state-mandated drugging of 1 or 2 children in a typical classroom.

They started off using schools to enact public health measures against the will of parents, and they are still trying to pull it off today. The more things change....

Handwriting

Okay, I've found it: the most pointless educational advice ever, regarding handwriting:

Begin with lines and shapes, encouraging children to draw all vertical lines from the top to the bottom. All circular shapes should begin at the 2 o'clock position, moving up, left, and around-like the letter c. (Kids tend to start at the top and make egg shapes.) Shapes using straight lines -- triangles, rectangles, and squares -- should always use individual lines that meet, not a single stroke with an attempt to make "pointy" corners. Every line should be drawn left to right or top to bottom. Vertical lines are drawn first, left side, then right side, and then the connecting horizontal lines. The horizontal lines on top are first, and all horizontal lines should begin at the left. Kids have their own short cuts, so these basics do need to be taught.

Gosh. I make my v's using a single, pointy-cornered stroke, instead of two strokes-- and yet, I have the gall to consider myself educated.

As for "these basics do need to be taught," I don't think so. When I was in about the 6th or 7th grade, most of the girls decided to make their handwriting stylish and pretty. Sure, we'd had a good 5 or 6 years of handwriting drills by then, but after all that effort, we weren't too enthralled with standard, uniform writing. We developed individual styles, some round and balloonish, some slanty and narrow, whatever we thought looked "cool". I experimented with I's dotted with open circles, elongated lacy writing, fat horizontally stretched cursive, and so forth. My dearest friend writes to this day in a wild, loopy, vertically stretched font which not infrequently causes her letters to go amiss with the post office, eventually arriving with the address written in some postal employee's handwriting on the front of the letter for clarification. My own writing is a combination of print and cursive (although I much, much prefer typing). Nor is the handwriting of many of the men I know either a) completely legible nor b) uniform. Somehow we all survive, handwriting notwithstanding.

While I'm at it, I'll also say that it is not necessary to teach typing. I began typing as a kid, when my brother and I played text-based adventure games. My abilities went from hunt-and-peck to my own organic system, using primarily three fingers on each hand (although I hit the shift key with my right pinky). I can type faster than most people I know, I don't have to look at the keyboard, and I'll never get carpal tunnel because I am not holding my hands in one stiff, unnatural position over the keyboard-- rather, my hands move around as I'm typing and the positions they take on are the ones that came naturally.

So, personally, I'd put "handwriting" and "typing" into the sheer busywork category.

Homeschooling on the rise

A US Department of Education report on homeschooling has just been released (based on a nationwide 2003 survey, so it's already out of date!). According to this random and representative sample, homeschooling has increased from 1.7% of K-12 students in 1999 to 2.2% in 2003. There were, in 2003, an estimated 1.1 million homeschooled children, a 29% increase over the 1999 number.

Parents were then asked which one of the applicable reasons they considered to be their most important reason for homeschooling—31 percent of homeschooled children had parents who cited concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure, as the most important reason for homeschooling and 30 percent had parents who said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction. While these were the two most common responses, another 16 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools was their most important reason for homeschooling.

On an unrelated note, I've been over at the NEA and AFT websites trying to find out what they have to say about homeschooling, and what they have to say is: nada. The NEA site has one "leave teaching to the experts" column, written by a head custodian rather than a teacher, but that's it. Essentially, home education is totally ignored.

The case for unschooling

I have to thank reader samuel for leaving a comment, which led me to his unschooling blog, which led me to this excellent post on unschooling. I hope you'll read the whole thing, but I just wanted to excerpt one good point:

There is at least one more thing wrong with the conventional model. Judging sources of information on internal evidence is a very important intellectual skill. In the classroom, that skill is anti-taught. The pupil is told things by two authorities–the teacher and the textbook–and his job is to believe what they say. Here again, a sufficiently good teacher may be able to overcome the logic of the setting and teach some degree of critical thinking–but here again, sufficiently good teachers are rare.

One of the great advantages of the Internet, considered as an educational tool, is that it is so obviously an unfiltered medium, leaving it up to each reader to figure out for himself how much to trust his sources of information. It isn't perfect, but at least it is teaching the right lesson instead of the wrong one.

Being able to decide what you think the truth is, based on logic, evidence, your own prior knowledge, and so on, is not just critical to a given individual's education, it is critical to democracy. People will hear conflicting claims and predictions in every imaginable political debate, but what Americans too often do is throw up their hands, give up trying to decipher it all, and vote on the basis of personality. They'll say they just trusted candidate A or B a bit more, and voted accordingly. That's a hideous basis on which to cast a vote!

I also think that one reason we have such short memories for political and historical events is that we're not cataloguing our observations with the idea that they might be useful in interpreting future events. We aren't in the habit of puzzling things out for ourselves, and we don't plan on using our prior experience to decide what we believe about events yet to come.

The specific point about the Internet is certainly true for me. I honestly enjoy diving into a sea of contradictory theories via Google, tossing some out and finding others intriguing. Was Flight 93 over Pennsylvania shot down by the US Air Force? What was Sibel Edmonds on to when she was silenced? Who killed John Kokal? Is my daughter magnesium deficient? Is the caffeine in all this tea I drink doing me harm? I like investigating this stuff, the same way I like reading whodunit murder mysteries and loved those Two-Minute Mystery books as a kid. Contradiction is just interesting, not vexing. I'm very glad my kids' enjoyment of puzzling through things will remain intact!

Hilarious

I am probably violating some sort of copyright here, but I had to post this. It's too good.

Relevant information

I once had a history class in which we studied world geography-- sort of. We had to be able to write in the names of all 190-odd countries on a map, and we had to know the names of all their capitals. We worked up to this point over the course of a semester.

Today I've been reading about Iran, which got me thinking about how we didn't learn, in that long-ago class, about the Strait of Hormuz. My teacher made no decision about which places were important to know about; every country and capital was treated as equally important, and no natural features (deserts, mountains, straits) were covered at all. It's a perfect example of teaching the shallow overview which turns out to be largely useless, instead of picking and choosing the critical elements and studying them in depth.

I submit that it is far more important for Americans to know about the Strait of Hormuz than to know where Myanmar is. Consider (here's the reference I used):

• The Strait of Hormuz leads from the Persian Gulf out into the ocean.
• 90% of Persian Gulf oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz on tankers.
• 22% of US oil imports, 30% of Western European oil imports, and 76% of Japanese oil imports come from the Persian Gulf.
• This oil must go through one of two shipping lanes, each only 1 mile wide.
  
• The Strait of Hormuz is right off the coast of Iran.
• Iran has said on several occasions that it will shut down the Strait if threatened.

The majority of Americans support military action against Iran. I have to wonder if they would still support this if they understood that the world's largest economies will lose anywhere from a quarter to three quarters of their oil, engendering a global economic depression? Sure, Americans support bombing Iran... we may know that the capital of Ecuador is Quito, but most of us have never heard the term "oil chokepoint".

More homeschooling hatred

Reader emtel asked if I had any sense of what drives intense hostility toward homeschooling, and I think that's a good question. I'm going to try to post on this soon, although really, I'm not sure I understand it. In the meantime, I found another example of this hostility here in my own state. From the Muskegon Chronicle (scroll down for original article):

Terrorists will strike a busload of students in the Whitehall area on Tuesday, killing more than a half-dozen and sending dozens more to hospitals.

. . .

The disaster won't be real, but it will look real, and the participants -- including students, emergency room personnel and firefighters -- will act as if it's real.

The exercise, one that is becoming familiar in the post 9/11 era, is part of attempts by emergency responders and Muskegon County school districts to prepare for the worst.

The exercise, which will involve the aftermath of a supposed explosion on a school bus... is being funded by homeland security grants awarded to several area school districts and Muskegon County.

. . .

About 60 middle and high school students... will be part of the exercise.... Local law enforcement agencies, fire departments, human service agencies, transportation services and medical services will participate.

Students from Muskegon Community College and Reeths-Puffer will assist in applying makeup to add to the reality of the gruesome scene. Between 200 and 300 people will observe the exercise, including school bus drivers, school administrators, emergency personnel and evaluators from agencies across the state who will provide feedback.

The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled.

Unbelievable.

Fear of autonomy

There's a blogger on the political left named Steve Gilliard, whose blog I no longer read as a result of his continual demonstration of his near-hatred of children. But he recently blogged about a CNN article on unschooling, and... well, I guess it's like picking a scab, but I went and looked at Steve's post after my mom mentioned it.

Sigh.

His co-blogger wrote:

One day, ONE of these kids will win some big academic post/scholarship/whatever.

Many more will open fire in assorted public places.

That's right, you read it here first: unschooling leads to mass murder. Because, as we all know, the only thing preventing humans from tearing each other to pieces with our bare hands is Structure and Discipline. (Never mind that most schoolchildren who open fire on their classmates do so as the result of bullying and torment which is widespread in schools. Just disregard this minor quibble.)

Steve himself wrote:

There are two problems here: one, the child has no sense of expectations. When you can do what you want, when you want, dealing with the demands of other people is difficult. You assume the world centers around you and your concerns.

People repeat this stuff, the old "Discipline is vital! Permissiveness will ruin your child's life!" but without much real thought behind it. Steve is a big believer in how all bad behavior or lack of interest in school or basically anything he doesn't find desirable in children is the result of bad (meaning inadequately structured) parenting. But then, Steve has no children.

Which child has a more accurate sense of their place in the world: the child who is out and about and actually in the world? Or the child locked up in an artificial environment in which being the teacher's pet, having the highest grades, being a top athlete or belonging to the 'in' crowd are all capable of instilling an exaggerated sense of importance? Further, given the frequent use of rewards and consequences in schools and the pointlessness of such external controls in an unschooling family, which child would be more often guided to consider what accrues to them? Which child is more likely to feel that what happens to them is the only relevant consideration? The kid with autonomy, who has a chance to develop intrinsic motivations for learning and civility and charity; or the kid who is incessantly bribed, whose greed and ego is constantly appealed to?

Steve then says unschooled kids will avoid difficult tasks. Yeah. Like, you know, that layabout Thomas Edison who never followed through with an idea in his life. Or that lazy, comfort-loving Margaret Mead-- when did she ever put herself out in pursuit of a higher goal?

He ends with this unintentionally funny sentence:

Sometimes you need to sit in a room and be lectured, so you can concentrate.

Ohhhhhh.... is that what I was supposed to be doing, instead of daydreaming and passing notes and doing my homework from other classes?

Numerous comments following the post defended homeschooling and unschooling, but there were also numerous comments which I can easily summarize as "Well, the world is a cruel and terrible place, and the earlier one learns to deal with hatred and oppression, the better." Some leftists want children to learn to obey and to accept and to toil in silence, yet simultaneously believe that dissent is more vitally important to our country's future than perhaps at any other time, because those in power are so evil and fascistic. I don't find this to be intellectually consistent.

Getting paid to go to school

[Thanks to my mom for pointing this out to me!]

Up until I read this article on school attendance, I wasn't aware that No Child Left Behind factors attendance rates into its yearly school evaluations. A higher attendance rate can mean substantially more money for the school district. And so, predictably, schools have begun to rely on rewards systems in an attempt to boost attendance.

CHELSEA, Mass. — Attendance at Chelsea High School had hovered at a disappointing 90 percent for years, and school officials were determined to turn things around. So, last fall they decided to give students in this poverty-stung city just north of Boston a little extra motivation: students would get $25 for every quarter they had perfect attendance and another $25 if they managed perfect attendance all year.

"I was at first taken a little aback by the idea: we're going to pay kids to come to school?" said the principal, Morton Orlov II. "But then I thought perfect attendance is not such a bad behavior to reward. We are sort of putting our money where our mouth is." [emphasis added]

Wow. It's those last two sentences that get me. If you want people to behave in a certain way, you'd better be paying them for it. Otherwise you're not "putting your money where your mouth is." This doesn't merely reflect the uncritical embrace of behaviorist methods that Alfie Kohn talks about, but also the "uber-capitalist" mindset in which all human behavior takes place according to economics and economics only. Asking kids to show up for school without a rewards scheme is, apparently, naive and unrealistic.

Back to the article:

In Hartford last year, 9-year-old Fernando Vazquez won a raffle for students with perfect attendance and was given the choice of a new Saturn Ion or $10,000. (His parents chose the money.) At Oldham County High School in Buckner, Ky., Krystal Brooks, 19, won a canary yellow Ford Mustang. In Temecula, Calif., the school district prizes can include iPods, DVD players and a trip to Disneyland.

. . .

In the Chicago public schools, students with perfect attendance for the first three months of the year are eligible to win $500 worth of groceries or up to $1,000 toward a rent or mortgage payment. Joi Mecks, a spokeswoman for the district, said that for every 1 percent increase in its attendance rate, the district received $18 million more in state money.

. . .

Last year, Fort Worth began holding an event for every student with perfect attendance for at least one six-week period. The students have chances to win cars, computers, shopping sprees at Pier One Kids, and a suite at a Texas Rangers game. More weeks of perfect attendance mean more chances of winning.

Is anyone else struck by the similarity to game shows and lotteries? Have any of the school administrators considered the potential negative morale that results from having rewards bestowed at random, rather than on merit? And for god's sake, has anyone thought about the public health implications of having clearly ill children coming to school? Or the fact that children are being punished for getting sick in the first place?

But for the schools, pedagogical or public health or ethics considerations cannot compete with that most primary goal: better funding.

Many schools have been galvanized by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which factors attendance into its evaluations. And schools, especially in poor districts, are motivated by money from state governments, which is often based on average daily attendance.

. . .

Schools in Fort Worth had a budget shortfall of $15 million last year, said Beatriz Mince, assistant coordinator for the district's Office of Parent and Public Engagement. "The only way to get extra money is average daily attendance," Ms. Mince said, adding that if average attendance increased by one student, the district would receive an extra $4,700.

It reminds me of basing grades on homework completion. The question is not "Are the kids learning?" but rather "Are the kids doing their work?" Or in this case, are they merely showing up? Are we keeping them adequately warehoused?

The article has one quote from an expert who opposes these incentives plans:

"It's against our grain to suggest that you have to cajole, seduce or trick students in order to get them to learn," said Dr. Jeff Bostic, director of school psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. "And where does it end? Are we going to need to give out a Porsche Boxster? Rather than say we're going to pay you if you show up, we've got to work harder at showing how school really does have relevance to these kids' lives."

It's a well-known fact that in order for an incentives plan to continue working over a long period, rewards must continue to be increased. But his first point is the key one, in my opinion: do we want to suggest that no student would willingly learn without carrots and sticks? That we are totally unable to point out the relevance of school in these children's lives (because maybe there isn't much relevance)? Or that it's simply so unpleasant to attend school that we have to pay students to do it?

Well, yes, actually, apparently that is what we're saying:

But other experts say incentives make sense because they parallel the working world, where employees are given financial incentives to work harder or better.

Okay, fine. School is really hard work, and we should pay kids to go to school because it's appropriate for school to mirror the working world. If that's the case, at what point do we start using the term "child labor"?

The article goes on to question the utility of rewards schemes, discussing school districts where incentives for attendance worked, had no effect, or actually resulted in decreased attendance. One expert said that it was a matter of getting an incentive of appropriate value, and that it needed to be delivered immediately following the desired behavior. These are the sorts of arguments which tend to dominate discussions of carrot and stick programs, according to Alfie Kohn; but what about questioning the whole idea?

Back in Massachusetts, the headmaster at the high school in Lowell, William J. Samaras, said a program to give laptops to graduating seniors who missed no more than seven days of school drew criticism that "we're giving them a prize in a sense to do what they're supposed to do anyway."

Of course, schools do that all the time. Kids get reward tokens for acts as basic as learning and being polite to other students.

Interestingly, in one district where the incentives program resulted in worse attendance, some students and teachers felt the situation was preferable.

Some students, however, said the incentive-only policy had had unexpected benefits because those who attended school were more likely to want to be there.

"Usually in a classroom that has kids that don't want to come to school, you don't get a lot of participation," said Sonya Garcia, 16, a junior. "It lowers my motivation for working. If I'm working with people who are focused, it creates competition and that gets me motivated."

Mr. Resnek agreed. "It's almost created a better school," he said. "It's selfish, but it's better for us who are here."

Kind of calls into question the compulsory nature of schools, doesn't it? And the new Michigan graduation requirements, which insist that every student be on the college prep track or be denied a diploma? What do we sacrifice when we use coercive carrots and sticks and utterly disregard the benefits of autonomy?