I was recently reading Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and had an “aha moment,” hitting a connection between what had been (at least in my head) two totally unrelated projects. Well, I don’t know that they’re actually connected; the whole thing is still completely hypothetical at this point. Since I don’t have a research department and team at my disposal, I could either sit on the thought or share it here. I usually sit on those ideas, and that gets me nowhere. What’s the worst that can happen? It turns out I’m wrong? I can live with that.
The Experiment That Fired Up My Thinking
Here’s the story: Shirky’s book discusses an experiment involving childcare workers in Haifa, Israel. I’d read about the experiment before—no idea where—but the way he framed it resonated with me this time around. If you’re unfamiliar with the experiment, I’ll give you the shortest, nuts-n-bolts breakdown I can. Essentially, the researchers were hoping to get a better understanding of the effects of “penalties” on behavior.
People Show up Late for Pick-up
People were always picking up their kids late at daycare, using excuses like traffic, working late, whatever. Initially, there was no penalty for picking up a child after hours; it was tacitly understood that parents should respect the daycare workers’ time and do everything within their power to pick up their children as promptly as possible. This was a reflection of their culture, which Shirky aptly defines as “a community’s set of shared assumptions about how it should go about its work, and about its members’ relations with one another.” [Ref] p 143, Cognitive Surplus, emphasis mine[/Ref]
They Added a Fine for Late Pick-up
The experiment made one move: it added a penalty to the rule structure. You’re late to pickup? You pay a fine. The fine was only 3 sheckels (which Shirky says at the time was about ten bucks), so this wasn’t do-or-die. However, you leave your kid after hours? You pay.
More Late Pickups and a Fundamental Shift in The Social Contract
What happened? Late pickups increased. In fact, they more than doubled. Suddenly, instead of feeling guilty about taking advantage of the valuable time of the daycare worker, parents went about their business and picked up the kids at their convenience. By charging for the time, the experimenters unwittingly replaced in the parents’ minds the social value of the workers’ time with a monetary sum. Lateness was no longer an issue of respect, a social issue; it was just a couple bucks.
Moreover, once the experiment was over and the penalty was redacted, parents still picked up their kids late. One can only assume that once their relationship to the workers was fully commoditized, parents, however unintentionally, permanently stripped their social relationship and sense of obligation to the daycare workers from the arrangement.
Shirky describes it this way:
How we treat one another matters, and not just in a “it’s nice to be nice” kind of way: our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunity and hinders others. …When [the Haifa daycare] culture came to include an explicit fine, the parents could view the workers as a means to an end, rather than as partners with a mix of social and commercial bonds. [Ref] p 135, Cognitive Surplus [/ref]
My Aha! Moment
Penalty or no penalty, the commoditization of social responsibility that happened at Haifa isn’t an isolated phenomenon. This is science that begins to illustrate what’s happening to education–it’s often viewed as either a waste of time or a means to an end, which means it’s been compartmentalized and removed from a larger, social understanding. Somehow (not sure how just yet) we’ve commoditized our culture’s relationship with education and socially devalued it–with notably bad results.
There are so many contributing factors here, and what’s correlative and causative, I’m not sure, since I’m not usually running SAS regressions in my office. Either way, here are some of the elements I’m considering:
- By offering so much at school (so many topics and activities), did we accidentally remove parents’ sense of responsibility to teach and model learning in society?
- Did our general sense of entitlement and fixation on our rights cause us to forget that an education, from a global perspective, is a privilege, honor, and reflection of our social health?
- Did we adjust to the relatively recent anonymity of our business relationships (meaning shopping at Target instead of the corner store) and extend that to teachers and schools?
- Has what we do in the classroom confused schools’ direct connection with larger “social and commercial bonds”?
At the Haifa daycare center, they never recovered. Even after the penalty fee was lifted, the perception of the workers’ time as less valuable and the parents’ sense of responsibility to them was permanent: the groundwork of culture and social responsibility shifted. If the same shifts are taking place in education, can we honestly hope to reverse them?
Elizabeth King
(c) Ana Schechter
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Have we, in our efforts to coddle this generation by giving trophies to every team in the soccer league (not to mention widespread grade inflation), convinced ourselves that effort is all that matters, not results?
I can’t even count the number of parents I’ve talked to whose incredulity about a child’s poor performance on the SAT results in misdirected anger at the test, and not consideration that maybe the child has been performing at a substandard level for some time before the SAT set it in such stark relief.
Maybe this is what you’re getting at in a more graceful way with your bullet point about entitlement?
To be completely honest, I hadn’t even thought about the SAT– it’s not really what I think about when I think about education or write at SooS. I’m also not saying “kids are crappy at school” or “it’s the kids’ fault” here (although I definitely think that sometimes it is). I’m more looking from an even broader step out: what’s really at the heart of the educational mood and direction in the U.S.?
I think what I’m really saying is that there’s been a shift in the relationship between Society and School, maybe even a breach in concept of the social contract. We legislate so much that it’s likely that “things you are tacitly expected to do and think for the social good” practically don’t exist anymore (which, on a total side note, may be why conservative political theory can sound so confounding). Anyway, most of what I was thinking about at the time was the #f***school hashtag, the abysmal attendance at parents’ night, that people don’t take their kids to arts events anymore (instead, they let the school do it.) The SAT could disappear tomorrow and these would all be just as significant issues. The point on this blog is to get at real education: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis. I’m sure you and I agree that a whole heck of a lot of that goes on on the SAT, but the SAT is so myopic in scope and I find it so deeply boring to talk about (probably because I have to spend so many hours a day with it.)
I don’t find the SAT as boring to talk about, but I agree with you that it’s really a sideshow to all of this. It’s just the lens through which I’m most often confronted by the inadequacies in our education system: parents are upset that a kid’s critical reading score is below average but admit that the kid never reads, etc.
Whatever the cause, and I think we agree that there’s no simple answer, what you’re talking about here is endemic, troubling, and not going away. I wish more of the national debate about education sounded like this blog.
I really appreciate that. It’s incredibly encouraging. Thank you.
I remember reading about this story of the daycare in the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Maybe that’s where you’ve seen it before?
I haven’t read it, but it’s totally my speed, so I’ll take that as an accidental book rec. Maybe I read about it in the paper? I’m a chronic paper-reader.
I think your bullets are relevant talking points, but I just started thinking about this as a literal comparison rather than a big picture one. Hasn’t school BECOME daycare for many parents? For many parents, schools are little more than custodial centers, paid for by their tax dollars. They wash their hands of their children’s educations because they’re “paying” those schools to do the job for them. Because money is changing hands, they are off the hook when it comes to reading to their children, taking them to museums, or visiting the library. I agree with your point that schools offer so many areas of education now that parents don’t feel they have to provide other enrichment. But why DO the schools offer so many subjects? Did that start because educators saw that kids weren’t getting enough additional learning at home, or did the schools start offering more so the parents relinquished the responsibility? I really don’t know, but it’s an interesting thought.
I guess that’s true too. The only thing there, though, is that we’ve always paid teachers. It’s not new that we pay them–something else happened in this idea of being socially responsible to it. I still can’t put my finger on it….
10 shekel is about 3 dollars. So, 3 shekel is about a dollar.
Just sayin’.
And, uh, 1 shekel is about 33 cents. Wise guy.
■By offering so much at school (so many topics and activities), did we accidentally remove parents’ sense of responsibility to teach and model learning in society?
I’m not sure I would say topices and activities, but I think when the courts charged the school with in loco parentis, we screwd the teachers, commoditizing (through law rather than with payment) the burden of the school to be responsible and absolved the parent. I think this was a huge mistake.
I’m also thinking that parents and students no longer perceive school as a place to learn, but as a place to play football or the violin on the taxpayer’s dime, so I guess if that’s what the author means, he or she has a point.
■Did our general sense of entitlement and fixation on our rights cause us to forget that an education, from a global perspective, is a privilege, honor, and reflection of our social health?
I think the perception of entitlement and fixation on rights came with educational law. Once the courts began to mandate different aspects of education, society no longer felt the partnership; it was a right.
■Did we adjust to the relatively recent anonymity of our business relationships (meaning shopping at Target instead of the corner store) and extend that to teachers and schools?
I think the shift to perceiving everthing as interchangeable and therefore not differently valuable (McDonaldization of the culture) has pervaded all parts of our culture, including education.
■Has what we do in the classroom confused schools’ direct connection with larger “social and commercial bonds”?
It’s not what we do in the classroom so much as what has been mandated from outside–people no longer perceive teachers as agents of power or change. The power is with the legislators, the administrators (especially in large, complex school districts) and the money-dolers; teachers are perceived as powerless. I’ll be interested to see the effect that the economy has on all this.
Perhaps this is why Catholic parish elementary schools for the most part successfully create community and with their limited resources and curricula achieve academic outcomes that contribute to high graduation rates at the nearby Catholic high schools.
I have never thought about that, but it’d be interesting idea to see data about it! Really interesting idea. Thanks!