It's nothing to do with appendages, or envy of them, but sometimes I wish I were a boy. Only last week I wished I were a year 9 or 10 (third or fourth form) boy at Rongotai College.
News reports of the college's scheme to get boys to read books by offering them what the teacher in charge happily called bribes made me wonder what I might have achieved in my school days if there had been a can of fizz, or a Subway voucher at stake.
Apparently, under the scheme, which is costing about $5000, the school wants 250 pupils to each read at least 10 books before the end of the year.
They must fill in reading logs about the books, including why they liked or disliked them; and parents also have to verify reading at home.
According to the Dominion Post, two books qualified for a can of fizz, five a Subway voucher, 10 a movie ticket, 20 a mobile phone top-up voucher, the top two pupils in each class got a school blazer and the top three pupils overall received a $50 voucher at Real Groovy/Rebel Sport.
Would the lure of a can of my favourite youthful tipple, raspberry fizz, have made me complete the bane of my third form compulsory reading, Silas Marner?
The carrot of a school blazer would have been a stick to me. But then, I'm a girl who never cared for uniforms unless they were on men.
Would bribes have made me grasp the fulcrum or electricity (after years of attending fourth form physics as a teacher aide I do know that a voltmeter is wired in parallel), would I have become a wiz at chemical equations or unlocked the delights of calculus?
But why stop at school? If I were given bottles of plonk, chocolates or perfume for completing household tasks (the proof captured on CCTV) under a government scheme, would I approach chores with gusto?
I could start the day, a merry whistle on my lips, tucking in the sheets before even attempting to get out of bed. Finally escaping to the loo, I would then have to scrub it. Would hand-washing qualify for a reward? There would be a public health interest in that, but the reward would depend on the requisite number of Happy Birthday renditions.
Tripping gaily downstairs I would note they needed a quick clean. I'd want extra for choosing the energy-efficient option of brush and shovel.
The cat, confused by this rare display of housework, would be meowing pathetically. Would feeding her deserve a reward or should I be punished for having a cat at all? And so it would go on. By breakfast I'd be too tired to go to work and I would have earned more than a day's pay in rewards anyway.
It is easy to understand schools desperately wanting pupils to read and Rongotai won't be the first to offer rewards of one kind or another. (Oddly, the only Rongotai one vaguely associated with reading is the mobile phone top-up voucher.)
But, as American political philosopher Prof Michael Sandel said recently, referring to a Dallas reading encouragement programme which pays pupils $2 per book read, the worry is that such payments could erode or corrupt the intrinsic good of reading by encouraging children to think that reading books is a way of making money.
Some children would already be motivated to read books for the love of learning, so why use money as an extra incentive?
While economic reasoning would suggest two incentives worked better than one, it could be that the monetary incentive undermined the intrinsic one, leading to less reading rather than more, or to more reading in the short run, but for the wrong reason. Some of the good things in life were corrupted or degraded when turned into commodities, he said.
Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, says rewards prove ineffective in the long run and most damaging to interest when the task is already intrinsically motivating.
I would be interested to see if Rongatai improves reading rates in the long-term or whether schools offering comprehensive schemes including school-wide daily reading times, with buddy-reading where able pupils assist the strugglers, do better.
In the meantime, I live in fear the Act Party will seize the payment idea as its next cure for any ills in education.
Perhaps Rodney Hide could test incentives on the errant David Garrett, who last week managed to offend the Law Society in Tonga while attempting to explain away offensive remarks made to a female Act worker. Rodders could give him a Bellamys meal voucher for every day Garrett behaves civilly.
If that doesn't work, perhaps Garrett could adapt his beloved "three strikes and you're out" policy to deal with his own behaviour.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
