From the Stick Motivation Department, Part Two: Class Participation

In last month’s post I discussed the coercive parenting technique of assigning chores to children. The alleged lesson of such coercion is to teach children the value of work, though it likely teaches them to hate it.

Coercive teaching contributes a number of techniques to the stick motivation department. Let’s take a look at class participation.

For middle and high schoolers, and even college students, teachers feel obliged—and claim the unquestioned right—to coerce quiet members of the classroom to “come out of their shells” lest they fail to succeed in life or live up to their potential; grades based on class participation, by as much as fifty percent, I have heard, is the brass knuckle approach to teaching this lesson.

Five to ten percent, perhaps as extra credit, may have some instructional value. But fifty percent? These classes of twenty to forty students are not courses in public speaking.

And grades, after all, are the carrots and sticks by which teachers maintain control of their charges. I’m not the first to suggest that grades be dumped from the classroom entirely.

In the old days, the traditional (and coercive) recitation technique of class participation required students to summarize the content of their reading assignment, or, frequently, to recite something from memory. If not accomplished to the liking of the teacher, the kids would have their knuckles rapped with a ruler, or worse. In ancient Rome, they were beaten with a stick.

The modern version is a mixture of old-style recitation and analysis. The former, as the new schoolmarms are wont to say, should be kept to a minimum, because “we have all read the assignment.” Memorization, of course, is scorned as authoritarian and having no place in school. The latter, analysis, can include putting the reading material into different words, evaluation, and, too often, the spewing of undefended opinion.

According to ed school edubabble, such discussions will help teach students how to think. It usually degenerates quickly into BS sessions. And some of the more talkative students have mastered the technique of impressing teachers by their glibness; the quiet ones are then marked down.*

In recent years, some class participation teachers have discovered—and have experienced revelations when discovering—that their heavy-handed approach to getting those pesky and resistant-to-talking quiet kids to speak up in class may not be the best thing for them.

This has come about largely due to Susan Cain’s 2013 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and her subsequently established website Quiet Revolution.  (See my related posts here and here.)

Jessica Lahey is one such reformed class-participation tyrant. Writing in The Atlantic, she firmly defended her conviction that quiet kids must be forced to speak up. When she received an “avalanche of angry comments,” many of which, to put it mildly, declared her “uninformed,” she wrote a softened article on Cain’s website. Lahey acknowledges that she was influenced to alter her teaching by Cain’s book and other articles on the topic (See especially Schultz and Cain for examples of teaching quiet kids without putting them on the spot.)

The upshot of “class participation reform” is that introversion and shyness are not the same and that any behavior can be motivated by multiple causes, not just what the extroverted teacher assumes is operating in the quiet kid.

“Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating” (Cain, p. 12). A room filled with twenty to forty classmates can produce considerable overstimulation for an introvert. Extroverts prefer the stimulation.

And most extroverted teachers assume shyness and introversion are identical. They also do not recognize that quiet kids may be actively listening to the other talkers, waiting for the moment to speak up when they have formulated what they would like to say. They also might be taking notes, say, for a subsequently required paper. Or, something extroverted teachers usually do not want to hear or acknowledge, the student may not like the teacher or the class, or both.** Certainly, there are other motivations.

But just as not voting in an election is participation in the political process, so also is not speaking up in class a form of participation. Teachers need to respond to, and find techniques of, reaching all personality types sitting in their desks.

A “one size fits all” approach to teaching, such as the assumption that speaking up in class is good for everyone, invariably brings out the specter of stick motivation.



* I must point out one more time that John Dewey, the alleged father of progressive education—“alleged” because he gave the epithet to Francis W. Parker—lectured when he taught, expected excellent memorization from his students, and wrote a book in 1938 to repudiate many progressive techniques used in his name, such as the necessity of class discussion to teach students how to think. For Dewey, subject matter was fundamental, because it is the “working capital” of thought.

The premise of many teachers today, as one colleague said to me years ago, is that “we teachers talk too much as it is. We have to get the kids talking.” I took that to mean less work for the teacher, something that was explicitly stated by my grad school classmates as justification for group projects: one paper to grade instead of four or five.

** Yes, I know there are teachers who brag about how they don’t care whether or not students like them or their courses. But they should.

From the Stick Motivation Department: Chores

There are many ways in which adults lord their size and power over children.

It usually begins with spankings of a disobedient toddler by, say, a towering six-foot-plus dad who leers, yells, then hits the helpless tot. (See related posts 1, 2, 3.)

Why? Aside from the excuse that “that’s the way my parents treated me and their parents treated them,” etc., ad infinitum, the most common rationalization is that children have to learn to mind, lest they run out into the street and get killed, or turn into juvenile delinquents, or become criminals.

“Didn’t hurt me none” is the less than introspective response of some adults when asked why they did not question their parents’ stick-motivation techniques.*
 
The assignment of chores to kids so they allegedly will learn how to work hard and become responsible citizens of society is another form of stick motivation.

Webster’s Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary both define “chore” as a tedious task that must be performed regularly, such as washing the dishes or hoeing long rows. The OED also says the word is a colloquial Americanism.

What astounded me when examining these two reference works was the absence of any mention that chores are not optional. Yes, adults sometimes do refer to their own monotonous tasks, such as brushing their teeth twice a day, as chores, but the origin of the term in American culture surely is coercion of the young.

Chores for children are almost never voluntary. Just ask a child what happened the last time he or she refused to do one!

Fortunately, novelist Jane Smiley, writing in Harper’s Magazine (paywalled here, available here), has put the kibosh on the supposed benefits of this favorite of coercive parenting.

Smiley was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, so she never had to clean her room or wash the dishes. She did have a horse and, as she puts it, through her love of and interest in the animal learned to work hard to groom and feed it and clean its stall, which meant removing the poop.

Smiley’s husband, on the other hand, grew up in Iowa, less than wealthy, and was forced to do chores—mixing concrete with a stick at age five and, later, pushing wet, heavy wheelbarrow loads of it across the yard.

Guess which one, Smiley or her husband, enjoys life more today?

Smiley’s husband feels guilty playing golf when there is always more work—chores—to be done at home; when doing the chores, his motivation is to get them over with as quickly as possible.** He was taught well. Chores are tedious drudgery, which means work is drudgery.

And that’s because parents give kids the dirty work as chores. Says Smiley, “Mom cooks and Sis does the dishes; the parents plan and plant the garden, the kids weed it.”

In addition to teaching the “value” of work, Smiley points out that another apparent purpose of chores is to make sure the children contribute to maintaining the family, by sharing the work that needs to be done. Smiley comments:

According to this rationale, the child comes to understand what it takes to have a family, and to feel that he or she is an important, even indispensable member of it. But come on. Would you really want to feel loved primarily because you’re the one who gets the floors mopped? Wouldn't you rather feel that your family's love simply exists all around you, no matter what your contribution? And don't the parents love their children anyway, whether the children vacuum or not? Why lie about it just to get the housework done?

Why lie indeed? It is really a threat to withdraw love if the child is not obedient, similar to the withdrawals of love for disobedience that result in time outs and being sent to one’s room.

Smiley concludes: “It's good for a teenager to suddenly decide that the bathtub is so disgusting she'd better clean it herself. I admit that for the parent, this can involve years of waiting. But if she [mom] doesn't want to wait, she can always spend her time dusting.”

Parenting, after all, is a twenty-plus year contract chosen and signed by the parents. Children are not their slaves.

Presumably, the American concept of chores originated on self-subsistent farms, where there certainly was a lot of heavy, tedious work to be done to maintain the homestead.

The “justification” of requiring pre-school children to lug heavy pales of milk and to pluck chickens, however,  is not the assumed necessity of a division of labor in the family. It is the value system of nearly all American farmers, absorbed by their citified descendants, of Puritanism. American culture still today is highly Puritanical.

And what might that value system be? The duty ethics of Christianity reinforced by philosopher Immanuel Kant. As one middle American farm-raised father said not too long ago: “You do your job because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.”

As Kant said, never act from inclination, but always in accordance with duty. Fun and pleasure are out. Chores are in.

In contrast, visit a Montessori school to see how children are taught without coercion to love work, to associate pleasure with it, and to learn the skill of intense concentration.


*Corporal punishment in all settings, which includes spanking by hand in the home, is now banned in forty-nine countries of the world. The United States is not one of them. Sweden was the first, in 1979, and surprise, surprise, those children who were not smacked or beaten did not turn into juvenile delinquents or criminals!

The website corpun.com archives a large number of video clips from around the world of both adult and child corporal punishment. I could only stomach watching one: a Sri Lankan military trainer hitting female recruits with a long stick.

**Stemming from the same value system, this is the motivation for children who eat their peas first to get the disgusting stuff out of the way so they can enjoy the good-tasting meat and gravy last!

Should Spanking Be a Felony?

In my previous post I argued that hitting a child or dog is neither nice nor necessary. Positive motivation and the desire and willingness to develop a warm relationship are what generate influence to channel behavior in appropriate ways. The implication about hitting a child is that it transgresses legal boundaries.*

Indeed, spanking would seem to violate child abuse laws and some judges have concurred (1, 2, 3). Current law says that any marks or bruising left as the result of physical contact constitutes abuse (1, 2, 3). In most states, however, the law exempts “reasonable disciplining,” though precisely what that means is not always clear. The trend is unmistakably in the direction of banning spanking.

Whether it leaves a mark or not, spanking is the initiation of the use of physical force. Its purpose is to cause pain and to command obedience to the will of the adult. Its consequence is usually humiliation. In light of modern theories of child psychology and child rearing, such adult behavior is unacceptable. Whether every spanking parent should immediately be arrested is an issue of the implementation of new law. A long and unquestioned historical context of using physical force as a teaching technique calls for education of the populace and gradual, not impulsive, execution of the new principle. Uninformed parents can be well-meaning when spanking their children. The complications of parental and child psychology call for a grace period.

Consider the young father of a toddler I observed a number of years ago. I was having my hair cut and the toddler was supposed to be obediently crawling into the barber chair across the way, but he was not cooperating. The father became exasperated and swatted the child on the behind. The boy cried and obediently sat in the chair. What struck me about this incident were the emotional expressions of the father: embarrassment, probably because his child in public view was not “minding” him, and guilt, probably for having had to resort to force. The father’s behavior was not mean-spirited or felonious. He just needed to learn better ways of relating to his son.

In contrast, our daughter’s first experience with a haircut was completely pleasureful. Before getting her near the barber’s chair, her talented hair stylist bounced her on his knee for a few minutes and said funny things to make her laugh. Her haircut was a pleasant success—no need for physical force. Bottom line: it’s all in the technique. Teaching method is everything. The hair stylist used the fun theory of behavioral influence.

The most significant emotion present in all spankings, including the young father’s behavior above, is anger. To be angry enough to inflict pain, one must feel that an injustice has been committed, which then is allegedly righted by the spanking. This is the absurdity of spanking. Has the child committed an injustice? Has he robbed a bank? No, he refused to sit quietly in a barber’s chair! When parental anger in the twenty-first century rises to the level of using an implement, such as a paddle, stick, belt, hairbrush, or wooden spoon, etc., the intent is mean-spirited and sometimes vicious. I do not sympathize with anyone who calls this “reasonable disciplining.”

Psychologies are complex, though, and parents have reportedly cried after using such implements on their children, saying they didn’t mean to or couldn’t help themselves. Is such behavior criminal? Some murderers have regretted their killings and said they couldn’t help themselves. What’s the difference between these two kinds of behavior? One has thousands of years of cultural tradition behind it saying that it is okay to hit children, the other has the same number of years of tradition saying that it is wrong to kill another human being. Saying that it is okay to spank because of our historical tradition is cultural relativism. Other cultures have equal numbers of years of tradition saying that it is okay to hit women and mutilate their genitals. Historical context is only relevant in putting the new law into practice.

Spanking should be a felony because behavior is controllable, and whether or not a mark or bruise is left on the body, physical force has been initiated by a big, powerful adult against a small, helpless child. The issue here is one of fairness to the young father with the toddler in the hair salon. Throwing him in the slammer or putting him on probation would not help him become a better dad. As always, the issue is one of education, of the adult.



*In spite of what animal rights advocates say, dogs are property and rights belong to the owner. Children are human beings and their rights derive from that nature as such.

On Hitting . . . Dogs and Children

Hitting is not nice. I’m talking about the non-self-defensive kind, the initiation of the use of physical force to get your way. Its goal is submission. Just think thief with a knife. If you don’t hand over your wallet, that is, submit to the thief’s wishes, you may suffer the physical force of a knife or fist.

Why are dogs and children hit? “Smacking” is a word one still hears today as a recommended teaching method for both. Pre-teen children are not usually known to be aggressive, requiring self-defensive restraint, though some dog breeds have the reputation of being aggressive and unpredictable. And it’s not uncommon to hear something like, “A Rottweiler can bite your nose off. You have to teach him who’s boss. Be the alpha dog!”

Well, let’s take that comment first. I probably could bite a nose off if provoked in the right (or wrong) way, and I suspect many a small dog could do the same. Indeed, in the very act of making a friendly overture, I have been bitten by a small dog. Does dog training require hitting? Does a dog that jumps up on the bed have to be smacked?

Consider the similarities between dogs and children. They both have minds. They both can learn. They both want to please their parents or owners. They both experience (sometimes strong) emotions, which means they can feel confident or insecure, happy or sad, eager or listless. Inappropriate methods of relating to a child or dog by using, say, force and fear can result in insecurity, which in turn leads to compensating behavior. In older children, this can lead to depression, drugs, alcohol, or crime. In dogs, it can lead to uncontrolled aggression. Teaching, whether of dogs or children, requires positive motivation, not negative. The alpha dog notion is a myth.

What about the original sin, or rather, the alleged aggressiveness of certain breeds, such as Rottweilers, Doberman Pinschers,* German Shepherds, and the notorious Pit Bull Terrier?** Uninformed hysterics aside, these dogs all have pleasant temperaments, if trained properly. Hit a dog—or me—and you might be surprised by the attack mode we each quickly move into. As with child rearing, pet ownership requires teaching and is the responsibility of the adult.

Of course, dogs are protective of their families and territory, but again the adult is responsible for the dog’s behavior, just as the adult is responsible for the child who hits a playmate or takes a playmate’s toy without permission. Dog bites are common among unsupervised children. The responsibility of the adult is to teach the child how to approach and relate to animals, not to leave the child alone with a pet. Pulling a tail or ear will certainly generate a response from a dog. Just try pulling my ear and see what will happen!

Higher-level mammals that possess a consciousness also possess a psychology. They are not stimulus-response black boxes. Their psychologies must be acknowledged and interacted with supportively. This does not necessarily mean that your dog should be allowed to sleep on all the furniture in the house or that your child should be allowed to eat ice cream anywhere he or she desires. Teaching, not hitting, which means positive communication and reinforcement, along with the nurturing of a warm relationship, is key to training an animal. This is not much different from what is required for raising a healthy child, except that the techniques used for the child must be more sophisticated in order to be appropriate to the higher level of consciousness. Even then, the techniques used must match the child’s stage of development. This means, for example, not treating the child as a small adult.

Wild horses, unfortunately, are sometimes still broken by tying them to a tree, letting them kick and fight until they give in, that is, are “broken,” so they will finally let a rider get on its back. Come to think of it, human slaves have also been treated the same way. Breaking the spirit is the goal of any initiation of the use of physical force; it is the goal of hitting. Dogs and children do not deserve to be treated this way. Their behaviors, with a little awareness, are predictable and understandable.

Smacking is the tool of a slave owner.



*As an undergraduate, I shared a basement with two Dobermans. (I had my own apartment; they had their own space.) They were two of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever met.

**Contrary to its reputation, the American Pit Bull Terrier can be used as a therapy dog. Are service dogs and all the exotic animals used in the entertainment industry trained by using negative motivation? I don’t think so. Check the links in this post.

On Extrinsic Motivation, Bureaucracy, and the Stage-Mother Syndrome

Carrot and stick motivation, especially the latter, as opposed to communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values, are alive and well in today’s world. The question is, why are such extrinsic sources of motivation so common? A number of reasons can be given.

For example, in the academic world of professorial tenure, faculty can almost never be fired. As a result, some administrators and chairs resort to stick tactics such as making meetings “mandatory,” providing sign-in sheets to yield evidence that faculty attended, and reciting stories like “back when I started to work in business, I said ‘yes sir!’ when the boss requested something of me.” None of these work and they certainly do not endear the administrators or chairs to faculty. In rare cases, professors have been docked a day’s pay for not attending a meeting or returning from a conference a day late. Needless to say, this tactic is even less endearing. Why do administrators and chairs feel they must wield these sticks?

The easy answer is that people tend to do what they were taught by their parents and significant others. And extrinsic, coercive methods of motivation continue to dominate our culture. But the academic world, especially the state-run university, is bureaucratic. Its management is top-down with myriad rules and regulations to guide lower-level decision making. Bureaucracy is the means by which government bureaus are run. In contrast, business management is bottom-up with policies derived from the needs and wants of paying customers and the requirements of making a profit. Employees are often viewed metaphorically as intermediate customers who perform valued services for management. Coercing and talking down to employees can lead to unhappy customers and unpleasant bottom lines. The profit motive, an extrinsic source of motivation for entrepreneurs, ironically encourages appeals to inner values in employees.

Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law. A truly free society, on the other hand, says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others. Intrinsic motivation is allowed to develop.

In addition to the external structure of bureaucracy as spur to extrinsic, especially stick motivation, an insecure psychology has to be another source. Local organizations, such as youth sports leagues, that issue edicts to parents that meetings or practices are mandatory, vacations are expected to be given up for sake of the sport, and games may be forfeited if a snack-bar work commitment is not met, are certainly pushing the limit of respectful communication among adults. Not that one should issue such edicts to children either.

The question is, why do the leaders of these organizations talk to other adults this way? The easy answer again is probably that they do not know better, as they have never learned alternative communication techniques. But for some the reason may be deeper, a psychological need to live the sport through one’s children to compensate for their own failings in the sport earlier in life. It is called achievement by proxy. As a result, such stage mothers or fathers—little league parents—push everyone hard, especially themselves and their children, and they brook no excuses for failing to make practice or the snack bar. Nothing is more important than the sport and they assume everyone else should have the same values. They become blind to the needs of others, especially the needs of their children.

The push for longer and longer seasons for younger and younger children, along with an apparent obliviousness to youth injuries, probably stems from this compulsive psychology. But then a similar psychology also probably operates in some (or many) bureaucrats who seem to need to prove something about themselves by issuing new edicts—new rules or laws. The more rules or laws with their names on them, the better they feel. And stick motivation seems to be all they know.

Extrinsic motivation can have its place in appropriate situations, but an excessive use of it, especially the stick part, often becomes a power trip. Appeal to inner values is the better way to go.

Caterpillars into Butterflies

I don’t know where I’ve been for the past several decades but I had never heard the expression “turning caterpillars into butterflies” used in relation to teaching. That is, until this spring when my daughter’s softball coaches used it several times to explain their goal of coaching twelve eight-and-under girls. Add to this the coaches’ commitment to “no child left behind”—meaning every girl on the team, no matter how young or inexperienced, would learn how to throw, catch, and bat or, if an older veteran, how to improve these skills—and you have a heck of a model of teaching. Winning certainly was not the only thing, and most of the girls did not seem to attach any significance to it, but winning did follow from the teaching.

So what does the metaphor mean for teaching? It is a biological process that turns caterpillars into butterflies, occurring naturally with proper nurture and a minimum of interference from predators and the elements. For teaching, this means that children are natural learners and therefore do not need to be forced to learn. They need guidance and motivation perhaps more importantly than any particular knowledge content; they need encouragement, not coercion, angry yelling, or contemptuous denigration. The goal of teaching is to build confidence in the child’s own ability to learn such that the child can continue to learn throughout life without need, or with only occasional need, of additional teaching. The butterfly knows how to fly and does not need additional “instruction” or development. A clipped wing, however, will destroy it.

Many years ago, when I was in high school, I played in an orchestra of extremely talented teenagers. (Almost all, I should say, were far more talented than I.) Several different conductors would direct us in weekly concerts. Only one knew how to get the butterflies to fly. He was a motivator of adolescents and young adults and was well liked. He would make exclamations like “Sound! I want to hear sound from you!” and “Brass, I can’t hear you!” Which to trumpeters, trombonists, and French horn players was a call to action. Not loud noise, but beautiful, controlled, and confidently self-assertive sound that made the difference between amateurishness and near professionalism.

The keyword here is “controlled,” for that is what skilled musicians exhibit—control of air stream and finger movement for wind instrument players and control of muscle movements for stringed instrument players and percussionists. Control is also what skilled athletes exhibit, in muscle movement of course, but also, as sports psychologists point out, in their thoughts about playing the game. The good motivator is the one who finds ways to make sure their students or musicians or athletes get their heads in the game and keep them there.

In contrast to the above orchestra motivator, one stern task master of a conductor succeeded in clipping the wings of the orchestral butterflies with one simple but true statement. He said, “Remember, the audience is applauding the composer as much as they are you, the performers.” Message: “don’t think you are so good.” The statement is true about audiences and, often, their standing ovations, but to say it to teenagers was utterly deflating to their developing egos. The conductor did not ask for sound and he did not get it. Was he predator or the elements? Take your pick. Demeaning comments kill confidence and a willingness to perform.

Patience is a requirement of good teaching and the passage of time is what is required for a caterpillar to pass through the chrysalis stage to turn into a butterfly. Let me conclude this post by bringing back my daughter’s softball coaches and describing their seemingly infinite patience with even the youngest, most inexperienced girl on the team, a girl who would tend to get down on herself and say “I can’t do it.” At one practice the assistant coach must have thrown thirty or forty balls to this girl for her to swing at, and with each swing she would fail to make contact. Periodically, the coach would stop to make an adjustment in her stance, then he would pitch more balls. On about the fortieth pitch . . . boom. A big pop fly went to shortstop. High fives, the coach insisted, were called for from all the other players; then he picked up the girl and said, “I don’t want to ever again hear you say that you can’t do it.”

A week or two later, the same girl made contact with the ball in a game that helped drive in winning runs. This caterpillar metamorphosed into a beautiful butterfly and that is the ultimate payoff of good teaching.