If you deconstruct the education
system (it would be easy – its’ already in ruins, all you need is to sneeze at
it and it will come down crashing) among the others, you fill find the two key
elements that make up the keep up the structure: the pedagogy and the system of
rewarding. Here’s to the latter.
For a child, the notion of
academic target (which shouldn’t exist in the first place) is to excel in the
upcoming exam. For the ambitious, star-spangled ones, it’s to stay at the top
and for the visionary gems, it’s to get the best student award. Either ways, the
focus is on the next exam, instead of the next learning opportunity. The actual
input as effort and thus ultimately interest in the topic and the output as
practical and applicable learning has been buried deep under the layers of
mark-sheets and class ranks.
In a study analysing the impact
of student incentives [1],
various monetary rewards were used. The
ones that incentivised class grades or interim assessment didn’t result in any
gain in students’ achievement. The ones that focussed on the inputs like
reading books or doing homework, rather than the outputs, resulted in statistically
significant gains. It would be worth noting, however, that further insights
into the research revealed that the gains from reading books was also up for
debate, as the students were now reading smaller books to get paid more. It was
because reading the book isn’t the input either, actually being interested to
read is – and that wasn’t incentivised.
The misplaced method of rewarding
and its reaffirmation creates a veil of short sightedness – pushing from one
goal to the next, without a clear vision on where it’s leading to, let alone
why. The same veil continues throughout the career. In higher education, the incentive
shifts slowly from getting good grades to getting a good job. Once in the job,
it’s getting good appraisals from one quarter to the next.
The same veil is prevalent in
businesses too. In one among the many similar surveys, this one on CFOs, it was
revealed that firms frequently cut on long term profitable investments for
short-term earnings targets [2].
This sacrifice of long term value creation for the quarterly gains has been
debated to be one of the reasons for the financial crisis of 2008.
Governments too arguably have
long been suffering from such short termism. With so much focus on the upcoming
election, governments would rather take populist measures instead of investing
thought, action and resources on initiatives that bears fruit much beyond the
voting horizon, sometimes even when the opposition has come to power instead.
Pleasing citizens instead of benefiting them, bitten by short termism is often considered
one of the biggest weaknesses of a democracy.
The same veil also makes our
targets for long term investing blurred in order to get instant gratification. Multiple
studies have revealed that people would choose to have $100 now than $120 at
the end of year. A 20% return thrown out of the window! This short sightedness
resulting in low saving tendencies was also studied to be prevalent among
primates in an extremely interesting study on monkey economy. [3]
Coming back home after a long
digression, what is to be done to rip apart the veil that’s structurally thrust
onto our faces to wear throughout our lives? And if we are evolutionarily meant
for short termism (case in point: monkey economy), how to get over it? One way
possibly would be to reward the actual, ultimate roots of the input. Reward the
effort and process of learning, not the result [4].
Make sure the child has a smile when a chapter starts, so that it’s not a frown
when an exam does.
Karm karo, par fal ki apeksha mat rakho
[1] http://edlabs.harvard.edu/analyzing-impact-student-incentives
[2] https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Research/Published_Papers/P89_The_economic_implications.pdf
[3] http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/11/monkey-economics-money_cz_df_money06_0214monkeys.html
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU
