The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

By Alfie Kohn
Publishers: Houghton Mifflin

Book rating – 3.5/5

Reviewed by Aditya Govindaraj

The basic premise of this book is actually quite simple – if you teach kids to work only for rewards, they will never learn to work for themselves. It pits internal motivation against external motivation and shows that the latter doesn’t really get us the results we want.

When I was in school, like all other schools, we had the grade system. The grade was, and still is, the yardstick by which we are measured for progression through schools and colleges, as well our general intelligence or IQ.

Why?

Imagine you’re playing a video game where you have to kill a hundred zombies to move to the next level. Then what next? Another round of shooting…then another…till you scream B-O-R-I-N-G. This precisely sums up my experience in school and college.

Say, you’re in the first standard (i.e. first level of the zombie shooting game), you are rewarded for getting everything right (good marks, etc). You get promoted to the next grade level (i.e. next level of the game). This goes on and on until you manage to figure out the system. By the time you’re in the 4th or 5th grade, you have essentially figured out the how the grade system works, so all you have to do is answer the questions in the paper correctly and repeat same thing tomorrow (i.e. by the time I’m in the 5thlevel of the zombie shooting game, I have figured out how exactly those zombies behave).

What is the consequence of your figuring out the system and outsmarting it? You lose your creativity as you progress through school and college. In a nutshell, you don’t learn anything, useful or of long-term benefit, beyond a certain level. You have eliminated all the zombies in that game. You have succeeded. Great! When you finish school and college, you have essentially outsmarted the system and nothing more.

What next? You wonder what to do with your life. You probably go to the next town to search for zombies only to find none. You’re confused. Very few people manage to figure out their lives once they pass out of schools and colleges. These people probably had parents who understood the system well enough to educate them on the finer aspects of life that the grade system did not address.

Grades don’t teach you to socialize with others (you don’t get A+ for making 10 friends) or foster compassion with others (you’re to compete with other and not collaborate with them, stupid!). In other words, grades don’t really develop right-brained activities1 (namely creativity, empathy, love and emotional intelligence) because the system is created to foster left-brained activities such as memory and logic and figuring out how to crack problems on a piece of paper (because only these can be quantifiable and measured).

Obviously, the system instills a competitive feeling among students to get the highest marks possible so as to progress to the next level.

What is wrong with this? Well, nothing really (competition is good, but only to an extent), except that it is very short-term oriented and doesn’t foster long-term development. All I had to do was learn everything, mostly byrote, which is pretty much the worst possible way of learning things, so that I could be better than everyone else (or my memory was simply better than others and not my thought process 2 ). I still don’t remember the dates when the World War II started and ended, and its not going to make any difference to the world, or my life, that I have forgotten the dates of something so immaterial to me (unless I am a historian or a quizmaster, which I am not). 

Alfie suggests reworking grades to either A+  or incomplete instead of failure because the word failure never really motivates the student to work harder. Actually, it does the exact opposite – it might make the student an anti-social or hostile or simply uninterested in academics. It is just a matter of wording that might change the overall behavior of the student. It might work, who knows? But we’ve got to try out different things in such a way it develops students to become better human beings and not just a bunch of smart alecks/criminals (depending on whether you topped the class or failed).

Will the grade-system change in the future? Unlikely. However, I would definitely buy this book if I were a parent or a manager of a company, to understand the psychology of rewards or how they affect human behavior. This book can be used as an ideal manual to foster long-term development of a child. 

Book rating – 3.5/5

Footnotes:  

1     Is Math more important than arts? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a subject of many a debate and controversy. But art teaches you to bond with people and to understand the world better. Art is omnipresent, you see it in writing, painting, sculpting, even in cooking. Everywhere. But it’s not important in school. If one has to award grades at all, why not grade right-brained activities as well? Sure, you can’t measure or grade paintings. But it would help to keep incentives in place or at least have activities, in equal measure, to foster right-brained activities (not just in primary school but also in high-school and colleges).

2    Some subjects do require us to think through, such as math and science. “Learning” these subjects without giving much credence to humanity and the environment is pointless. It is a consequence of grade-level schooling and too much emphasis on left-brained activities which can be pretty harmful. It is also a consequence of capitalism, to some extent. Remember, the world is full of people as well and not just money. Economics is important, but people are even more important. It is important to value and nourish other people at an early age and throughout school and colleges. Competition, in my opinion, kills this.