more about learning

Even though lots of experiments and observations of people learning tell us that reward-based systems are no good, we still do it. From stickers and candies for appropriate behavior in classrooms...to letter grades for everything from singing to language learning to mathematics...right up to tenure or not, Pulitzer and Nobel and such prizes - we like to arrange people along a line. It is tidier than reality, than acknowledging the true strengths, weaknesses, and chasms in people's skills and character, than saying: "Well, this person is the best scientist I know, but she can't cook with a darn." Or, "That dude can perform brain surgery with the best of them, but he's also having affairs with all the nurses."



I like this instead, from here:

"The proper stimulants to study," Haven added, "are not medals, or position in class, or prizes, but the gratification produced by an enlarged acquaintance with truth, and by the greater influence for good thereby produced."

Today I went to hear Lee Shulman, Professor Emeritus Somewhere, and former Something Else Important at Stanford, speak about teaching and learning in universities. He made lots of really good points, about collecting evidence of our efforts to teach students in academia, and turning an eye of inquiry on EVERYTHING, including how universities function.



That is excellent but if we're going to take this truly to heart, it might be time to question the tenure process. Bureaucratic machines comprised of lots of individual people tend to take over and become self-perpetuating.

My biggest concern about academia is that the pursuit of science and scholarship becomes - not for everyone of course but an influential group - an ego chase. People enter fields not to Do Good (whatever that is) but to make themselves Feel Good. The scary part (or the other scary part) is that this motivation is invisible to most - it lurks in a subconscious somewhere, not to be unearthed until some major psychic event or trauma. And we can't go around randomly assigning people to experience trauma.

So what do we do? I vote to try to remain cautious, skeptical, open-minded, conscious...sounds like true science, eh?