The Peripatetic Philosopher shares another poignant response:

AN EXECUTIVE SPEAKS!

“An Excess of Intellectual Emptiness”

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© February 2, 2017

NOTE:

This missive has generated a considerable response.  A teacher’s comments were posted as representative of that profession and well received.  This is one from a former executive.

AN EXECUTIVE WRITES

I enjoy reading your blog and notes and emails. Each stimulates a variety of thoughts and ideas. I often think of responding but then, considering the volume of email you must receive, change my mind and decide to leave it to your more educated and erudite readers to chime in. 

For a while, you have been offering critiques of our current education and child rearing practices. I get what you’re saying, though I do not always agree. I have the impression you have read more books than I have ever seen - and I've been in many libraries.

This last piece on grades and rewards in education reminded me of a book by Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards. I read this book about 25 years ago and have referred to it many times since. Using peer reviews and published studies as justification, he shows that people perform below their capacity and even do inferior work when enticed by money, status and other incentives. I wonder if you are familiar with Kohn's works. He has published at least seven books on related subjects. 

The situation you describe in the Florida reinforces his proposition. In some cases, people will adjust their approach to achieve only the target (and reward) rather than maximizing use of their talents to exceed expectations. 

He also devotes ink to the detriment of punishment for failure to achieve. The teacher's 50 year old story was indicative of the failure of punishment.

In the time it took for him to march the student down "to the office" and deal with his complaining parents the following day, he might have achieved a more positive result talking to the student about his motivation for those words and explaining why violence isn't the answer.

I was starting my third year in high school in 1967. I remember the unrest, the protests, the social change and the fear of the unknown it inspired. I realized  that other teenage cohorts, going back to the depression, WWII, the Korean War, nuclear threats, the Viet Nam War, and “trickledown economics” (okay, maybe that one wasn't so disruptive) and on and on, experienced the same fears and angst.

I went to a Chicago public high school with 5,000 students, all boys, black, white and Latino. Its behaviors reflected the times. The times fluctuated from calm to violent. We all had a hard time seeing our futures. The young man was reflecting the turmoil and violence of the times. He needed help to understand rather than be treated in kind.

Thanks for your inspiration.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for a most candid letter.  I have not read Alfie Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards” but I have read others of the same mind, and do agree with his premise.

Regarding the teacher referenced in the last missive, given the insulated antagonism so often manifested in young people of a certain mind, and given that most schools here in Florida, even in his time, have had to have security present just to protect the teachers, I doubt if it would have penetrated this young man’s hostility.

During the late 1970s, I taught graduate school at a number of universities.  In this one particular seminar, I had a young pretty somewhat fragile African American woman who was teaching high school literature in Tarpon Springs, Florida.  She said school was a combat zone, and that she shuddered every day she faced her class.  Most of the boys were big, rowdy and were not interested in learning.  They would disrupt discussions, shout obscenities at her when she asked them to be quiet, and in language more coarse than what the teacher in the previous missive mentioned, doing so with impunity. 

Innocently, I asked her if she brought the matter to the attention of the principal.  She laughed nervously, “He is part of the problem!”

“Part of the problem?” I asked.

“Yes.  He is a big sports fan, and they’re all athletes.”  She said this matter-of-factly as if she had no other choice than to tolerate the insults, or resign.  She chose the former.

We are in the most divisive society I have experienced in my long life with one side promoting the ideal, which does not exist, while the other side promotes rigorous enforcement of law and order, which also doesn’t work.  So, we are between a rock and a hard place.

I write this in my new book, THE VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST:

Man is still unfinished. He is only a recent inhabitant of earth, here no more than a few hundred thousand years. The purpose of his life is to live it, period. What he does is an expression of that purpose.

The problem with many students and workers is that they seem unable to see what is true from what is false. They want to be told. They don’t want to struggle to find it out on their own; so they wait. They wait freeze framed in suspended adolescence, grown children who first fail to act as young adults as students and later as workers on the job, falling back on parents to bail them out of whatever difficulty they get into at whatever juncture of their existence. How long will this go on? It is difficult to say. The prospects are not encouraging.

We have been unraveling as a society ever since the end of WWII escaping into our games (professional athletics as entertainment), our tools as toys (electronic gadgets), leaving our civility in the closet. 

Parents don’t want to behave as parents; students don’t want to be learners; workers don’t want to be responsible for their own destiny; and society allows itself to be swayed by the propaganda on the left and the right with the maturity of terminal adolescence. 

We see this in the corporate world of work; we see this in Congress and the President; we see this in local government; we see this in our own homes and in ourselves.

Evidence of this absurdity is in those advocating the Monday after the SUPER BOWL in the National Football League on Sunday, February 4, be declared a national holiday.  Why?  Because people will be so smashed from excess drinking and partying that they will not be able to perform on the job. 

This suggestion gives evidence of how deep in the rabbit’s hole we have sunk.  Millions of Americans are homeless and anchorless, yet these mindless advocates of a Super Bowl holiday give no attention to the fact that it will cost the economy more than $1 billion in lost wages and productivity. Go figure!  I can’t.