Stop Motivating Your Students

I was once challenged to a spelling competition by a six-year-old inner-city girl. Though she had the option of playing outside, she thought writing words on a marker board was more fun. She named a word and the race was on to write it correctly first. Just to make it fair she made me look the other way while I wrote. Her favorite word was "butterfly" and she spelled it with two T's and everything.

This little girl had not yet had the love of learning stolen from her.

Dr Edward Deming often explained to befuddled managers that the idea of motivating employees is an illusion. But managers can demotivate. Some ways to demotivate are obvious like poor working conditions or communication. Other ways are less intuitive like tightly linking pay to performance or holding workers to quotas. The false assumption behind this type of thing is that people don't care about their work and so you must bring out the carrot and stick to motivate them.

But most people want to do a good job just like most kids want to learn everything about the world around them. They only need the proper tools and a little direction. The carrot and stick only serve to replace intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation. They can now be controlled but will only do the minimum for their reward. There is no joy or enthusiasm or drive to succeed left for them.

A teacher can't make a child learn no matter what they do but they can shape the trajectory, supply resources (preferably for the awesome stuff), and support the child's innate enthusiasm. Any more is less.

School Lunches and the National Institute of Health

Many people believe science tells us the best way to live and therefore we should obey the edicts of the scientific experts. The human race, being a rather ornery bunch, tends to rebel against such enlightened proclamations so the power of government must be wielded if we are to see progress.

I present for your consideration the following example of progress.

"We should bring our own lunch!" chanted dozens of Chicago seventh graders.
Principle Elsa Carmona says she banned students from bringing lunch from home so they would eat the healthy food served in the cafeteria. (Chicago Tribune)
Everyone wins: the parents don't have to fool with packing a lunch, the students eat healthy according to the best government standards, and the food provider gets lots of federal money to mash up some beans and flour into something that looks like dog food.

With obesity becoming an epidemic among junk food-loving school children government schools must compel their wards to eat only the provided expert-approved lunch. Only those experts know enough to hand down the one true healthy diet.

Nothing here is shocking. Indeed it is conventional thinking. A lengthy NYT article* however questions the conventional wisdom (and government experts) on nutrition.

Among the many interesting data points in the article is a story about the National Institute of Health's (NIH) guidance on eating less fat starting in 1984. The objective was to lower the heart disease rate.

Reality has not cooperated.

In the past 30 years the heart disease rate has remained unaffected. However obesity has grown from 14% in the 60s and 70s to 22% by the end of the 80s and has continued unabated. It has gotten so bad among children that they renamed "adult-onset diabetes" to "Type II diabetes" and the First Lady has made childhood obesity her number one cause.

It's possible that the obesity epidemic is unrelated to our government's insistence on fat free diets. However evidence is building for an alternative hypothesis. Harvard Endocrinologist David Ludwig explains to the NYT how carbohydrates affect insulin and blood sugar which in turn affect appetite. The simple version is that carbohydrates provoke a spike in insulin which burns though the carbs quickly lowering blood sugar and causing ravenous hunger only a few hours later.

"[This] strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred...because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier."

There is much about this incredibly complex process that scientists still don't understand. It is also important things to keep in mind that different people react differently to different food so a particular diet may not be appropriate for you though it's fine for someone else. But these points only serve to reinforce the conclusion that well meaning government intervention in our lives can have disastrous repercussions even though it is based on the latest in scientific research. If nothing else we see the danger of putting all the eggs in one basket. But more than that we should not allow flawed government to so intimately control us.

Better to take responsibility for making our own choices as we are the ones that must live or die with the consequences, not the government bureaucrat.

*The NYT article while containing fascinating information may be in your tl;dr range. It's poorly organized and goes back over previous points from time to time. However, I found its account of the history of diet and government recommendations as well as the scientific information on the endocrinological process very enlightening and worth the effort.