Giving Learning a Purpose Beyond Rewards

The thirtieth sticker does not hit like the first, which ought to create a problem for an education whose answer to indifference is another sticker. How many do we imagine it takes before the child becomes an expert? The premise is funny because it mistakes accumulating rewards for developing a relationship to the work. We can keep inventing things to buy with the points while the learner remains interested mainly in the points, and then wonder why the elaborate arrangement has not produced mastery.

Does anyone picture a Renaissance apprentice saying they would have abandoned the painting if not for the stickers? Or Alexander refusing to hear another word from Aristotle until the points were added to the chalkboard? The absurdity is that the reward has become more important than what the education could make possible. We can immediately recognize a purpose the work might contain, something the learner wants to become rather than a payment for continuing to sit there.

When meaning has been removed from the work, the reward is being asked to perform an enormous repair. It must explain why the task deserves attention, overcome the boredom of doing it and sustain the effort needed to become good. Meanwhile the thing purchased with the reward often matters much more to the child than the ability the education supposedly develops. We should be suspicious of a design that keeps strengthening this second purpose while leaving the first unexplained.

Rocketry makes the alternative particularly clear. A child can care intensely about rockets without initially caring about mathematics as a school subject. Mathematics acquires another significance when it becomes part of understanding how flight works, because the learner now has a reason to get the relationship right. The work may still be hard, but its difficulty belongs to an ambition rather than to an obstacle course for earning another virtual accessory.

History can enter through the same interest when the child begins asking about the space race. A technical achievement turns out to have political purposes and human circumstances, which require knowledge the original enthusiasm did not contain. This is why interest and ownership can support a broader education. An interest is a place from which to discover more, not a command to confine every subject to what the learner already likes.

Some practice will remain repetitive, and acknowledging that does not rescue the points system as an educational philosophy. People repeat difficult work when they are trying to acquire an ability they want, even when that particular minute is not enjoyable. The relevant question is whether the repetition makes sense within the undertaking. A learner can be helped to see that connection without being told that every exercise should feel like entertainment or be compensated as though it were a grievance.

Rewards can also teach a competing definition of success. If the mark is what counts, then whatever obtains it fastest becomes an attractive strategy, whether that is choosing easier work or submitting an answer one never understood. The adult may object that the student has missed the point. But the system itself has supplied another point, one whose rewards can be acquired without the mastery we claim to value.

I want the education to make becoming capable the rewarding part. That means connecting knowledge to the child's ambitions, letting those ambitions reveal further subjects and giving real progress enough substance to matter. Encouragement can accompany the work, but it cannot supply all of its meaning. Otherwise the thirtieth sticker leaves us with the same educational problem and the pressing administrative question of where to stick the thirty-first.