Written By Sherwood Kohn
Monetary rewards for good grades actually work. I have seen average students strikingly improve their report cards for a few bucks. The incentive that money provides is effective in encouraging children to study harder, at least in the short term. (See “What’s the Right Reward for Good Grades?” pg. 64)
But is it only a short-term measure? Over the long haul, at what point does a child make the transition to love of knowledge for its own sake? Or does he or she ever? And is that something to be desired?
In a society that measures intelligence by the numbers, i.e., the SATs, creativity and love of knowledge are not rewarded monetarily. Teachers and artists are seldom celebrated for their presence on the list of the nation’s multimillionaires.
Most social critics believe that we are a materialistic society, that we care more about the things that money can buy than we do about what it cannot: abstracts like love, courage, honesty, altruism, creativity, generosity, desire for the public good.
The traits that plunged us into the current recession: greed, selfishness and amorality, have been all too prevalent for the past 50 years, and the education system, with its No Child Left Behind deemphasis of the arts and character building, has not helped.
Not that I blame parents who want their children to get good grades in school. Good grades are important if the kids want to get into college. But what do colleges want? Surely, not only good grades, but good scores on the SATs. High numbers. Very few colleges place primary emphases on their applicants’ creativity, character and thirst for learning.
For most parents, the educational system is a trap. They must comply with its standards if they want their children to succeed. So they point them in the appropriate direction; they give them the currently accepted incentives to produce the right numbers, numbers that will assure their success in a society that measures success numerically – at least, short term.
But what about the long term? Is there a point at which a young man or woman realizes that the numbers have very little to do with actual thinking? That numerals are only digits on a computer screen? That they have nothing to do with humanity?
One hopes that after satisfying the short-term demands of the material-oriented, dehumanizing environment into which they were born, our children will realize that they must think critically about their roles in the the society of the future.
Perhaps higher education is the last best hope. As parents, we can teach our kids to swim upstream, but once they get to the headwaters, someone or some thing must help them to become sentient beings. But why wait for college? Why not start earlier?
