The Carrot and The Stick in Education

Dr. Theva Nithy
Are we actually achieving what we think we want to achieve by having an education system structured the way it is now, based on archaic ways of thinking and with its carrot, sweeter carrot and stick, sharper stick approach?
The research and the science says NO, but governments, social scientists and educationists have, for the last century, made the opposite choice – IGNORE THE RESEARCH AND SCIENCE AND DO WHAT WE ARE DOING NOW ANYWAY! The current education system is stifling and eroding the one talent and skill that young people of the 21st century need most of all – the power of creative thinking.
Different types of exposure and different types of experiences change the actual structure of brain development. You could say with a very high degree of certainty that children who grew up in the digital age have brains that are literally different from the rest of the human race. This will also cause different ways of thinking and will have different demands for mental stimulation and sustenance. Most importantly, these brains will learn differently.

Our children and students are a different, perhaps new and improved, version of the evolving human brain. They represent the first real generation who grew up nurtured by technology - surrounded by mobile phones, email, Facebook, intelligent systems and digitised information - and their brains and minds have been programmed accordingly; and differently. To expect them to be down and cool with an archaic education system that represents the remnants of the Industrial age is not only crazy, but downright foolish!
There is this puzzle called The Candle Problem. It was created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker and here’s how it works. Suppose I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks in a box and some matches, and I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall above the top of that table, light the candle and ensure the wax does not drip onto the table. You cannot move the table." How would you proceed?
Now, many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall, which does not work of course. Some people have the perfectly logical idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle and try to stick it to the wall. Also does not work. Eventually, most people figure out the solution. The key is to overcome what's called Functional Fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. It can also have this other function, as a platform and drip tray for the candle - The Candle Problem.
A scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S, conducted a similar experiment. This one shows the power of incentives. He gathered his participants and said, "I'm going to time you. How quickly can you solve this candle problem?"
To one group he said, “I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem.”
To the second group he offered rewards. "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times you get a hundred dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today you get two hundred dollars."
Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?
Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer.
Three and a half minutes longer!

Now this appears to make no sense, right? If you want people to perform better, you reward them with bonuses, commissions – sweet carrots. But that's not happening here. You think you have an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity. It does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.
What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not a single result in a series of experiments. This has been replicated over and over again, for nearly 40 years. The rule that is supposed to be - if you do this, then you get that – only works in some circumstances. This is one of the most robust findings in social science. It is also one of the most ignored.
Scientists have looked at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what education does. What's alarming here is that our education operating system is built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks, exam results, promotions and scholarships. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that industrial age approach does not work and often does harm as it psychologically increases dependence on outside motivators and negates free will, creativity and thinking skills.
So, Glucksberg did another experiment similar to the first, where he presented the problem in a slightly different way. This time the tacks were lying on the table, outside the box. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table – same rules apply. 1st group: we're timing for normal population performance. 2nd group: we're giving you sweet carrots. What happened this time? This time, the carrot group kicked the other groups behind.
Rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks - where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. For tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there and zoom straight ahead to it - they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be thinking like this. The solution is not obvious. The solution lies in the fringes of your mind. You need to be looking there, outside the box. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our creativity, and keeps out thinking and strategies inside the box. Those creativity and intuition skills that help solve society’s Wicked Problems.
Do the problems that you face have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. For candle problems of any kind, in any field, those “if-then” rewards, the things around which we've built our education system, do not work. To make matters even more complicated, in the real world we need to listen and collaborate with other people – increasing levels of complexity by the 10th degree
Dan Ariely, and American economists, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. They then offered them, depending on performance, three levels of rewards - small, medium and large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward.
What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skills, bonuses worked as they would be expected to: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what governments and education systems do. And what is worrying, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that educationists are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. If we really want to get out of this mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things - to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.
Scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach, built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting and because they are part of something important. That proposed new operating system for our education system orbits three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives.
Purpose – directing our mastery into a drive to achieve in the service of something larger than ourselves because we believe in a cause that is greater than our own.
Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters, derived from our own autonomous urges.
Education Systems are not trees. They are computers. Somebody invented them. It doesn't mean they are going to work forever. Traditional Education systems are great if you want compliance and people who do not know how to think. If you want engagement, and autonomy, purpose and mastery- self-direction works better.
Google has 20 Percent Time, where engineers can spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. At Google, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time. Things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.
Another system is the Results Only Work Environment - The ROWE. It was created by two American consultants, in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.
What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, and turnover goes down. Autonomy, purpose and mastery- these are the building blocks of a new way of doing things and a new way of learning. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice. But it's Utopian."
There is proof.
The mid 1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model and do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Ringgit. They did it because they enjoyed doing it.
Now if you had, just 10 years ago, gone to a human being, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober person anywhere on planet Earth, who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.
There is another very important and hugely interesting experiment that was conducted in India a few years ago, called, “Hole in the wall”. Simply put, Dr. Sugata Mitra of NIIT India, placed computers and touch pads into walls all over India, stood back, and watched, recorded what happened. After replicating this experiment all over India, Dr. Mitra proposed a learning idea called Minimally Invasive Education.
“Minimally Invasive Education™ (MIE) is a solution that uses the power of collaboration and the natural curiosity of children to catalyze learning. It is defined as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention by a teacher.”
The core idea behind MIE is that groups of children are able to learn on their own without any direct intervention from teachers. Dr. Mitra found that children using a Hole-in-the-wall Learning Station required little or no inputs from teachers and learnt on their own by the process of exploration, discovery and peer coaching. The idea of MIE has been fine-tuned over a period of time based on observations and educational experiments conducted at NIIT.
MIE uses the intrinsic motivations in children and provides an enabling, autonomous environment where they can learn on their own, thereby providing purpose leading to mastery. While experimenting with the Learning Station, children pick up critical problem solving skills. Most importantly, the learning occurs in a collaborative setting where children can share their knowledge and in the process, inherent group dynamics, and a process of self-selection, culminates in a highly organised educational environment.

Conventional pedagogy focuses on many teachers’ abilities to disseminate information in a classroom setting, where no autonomy and hopefully purpose leading to mastery might be achieved. MIE complements a formal schooling environment by providing a much needed balance for a child to learn on his own and self-selecting to move on to higher levels of wisdom and achievements..
This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. There is intrinsic (bottom-up) versus extrinsic (top-down) motivators. There is autonomy, purpose and mastery versus carrot and sticks.
Who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, purpose and mastery– every single time!
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows.
One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of education; do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive - the drive to do things for their own sake and the drive to do things because they matter.
Here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our minds. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what education does instead, if we bring our motivation into the 21st century, if we can get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can radically transform and strengthen our education systems. We can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.