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Mr. Kohn raises some questions about Paul Chance's article in the November 1992 Kappan and suggests that an engaging curriculum - not manipulating children with artificial incentives - offers a genuine alternative to boredom in school and to diminished motivation when school lets out.
IN THE COURSE of offering some suggestions for how educators can help children become more generous and empathic ("Caring Kids: The Role of the Schools," March 1991), I argued that manipulating student behavior with either punishments or rewards is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Paul Chance, taking exception to this passage, wrote to defend the use of rewards (Backtalk, June 1991). Now, following the publication of his longer brief for behaviorism ("The Rewards of Learning," November 1992), it is my turn to raise some questions - and to continue what I hope is a constructive dialogue between us (not to mention a long overdue examination of classroom practices too often taken for granted).
To begin, I should mention two points where our perspectives converge. Neither of us favors the use of punishment, and both of us think that rewards, like other strategies, must be judged by their long-term effects, including what they do for (or to) children's motivation. Chance and I disagree, however, on the nature of those effects.
Rewards, like punishments, can usually get people to do what we want for a while. In that sense, they "work." But my reading of the research, corroborated by real-world observation, is that rewards can never buy us anything more than short-term compliance. Moreover, we - or, more accurately, the people we are rewarding - pay a steep price over time for our reliance on extrinsic motivators.
REWARDS ARE INHERENTLY CONTROLLING
Applied behaviorism, which amounts to saying, "Do this and you'll get that," is essentially a technique for controlling people. In the classroom, it is a way of doing things to children rather than working with them. Chance focuses on the empirical effects of rewards, but I feel obliged to pause at least long enough to stress that moral issues are involved here regardless of whether we ultimately endorse or oppose the use of rewards.
By now it is not news that reinforcement strategies were developed and refined through experiments on laboratory...