gat

the activities I selected would be intrinsically interesting anyway, so the financial incentives would
only intensify student interest. What a surprise I got!
Instead of becoming a model experiment proving the power of market incentives, disaster
occurred. Quality in work dropped noticeably, interest lessened markedly. In everything but the
money, that is. And yet even enthusiasm for that tailed off after the first few payments; greed
remained but delight disappeared.
All this performance loss was accompanied by the growth of disturbing personal behavior—kids
who once liked each other now tried to sabotage each other’s work. The only rational reason I
could conceive for this was an unconscious attempt to keep the pool of available cash as large as
possible. Nor was that the end of the strange behavior the addition of cash incentives caused in
my classes. Now kids began to do as little as possible to achieve a payout where once they had
striven for a standard of excellence. Large zones of deceptive practice appeared, to the degree I
could no longer trust data presented, because it so frequently was made out of whole cloth.
Like Margaret Mead’s South Sea sexual fantasies, E.L. Burtt’s fabulous imaginary twin data, Dr.
Kinsey’s bogus sexual statistics, or Sigmund Freud’s counterfeit narratives of hysteria and
dream, 14 like the amazing discovery of the mysterious bone which led to the "proof" of Piltdown
Man having been discovered by none other than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who, after the fraud
was exploded, refused to discuss his lucky find ever again), 15 my children, it seemed, were able to
discern how the academic game is played or, perhaps more accurately, they figured out the
professional game which is about fame and fortune much more than any service to mankind. The
little entrepreneurs were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear!
In other unnerving trends, losers began to peach on winners, reporting their friends had cheated
through falsification of data or otherwise had unfairly acquired prizes. Suddenly I was faced with
an epidemic of kids ratting on each other. One day I just got sick of it. I confessed to following an
animal-training program in launching the incentives. Then I inventoried the remaining money, still
thousands of dollars, and passed it out in equal shares at the top of the second floor stairs facing
Amsterdam Avenue. I instructed the kids to sneak out the back door one at a time to avoid
detection, then run like the wind with their loot until they got home.
How they spent their unearned money was no business of mine, I told them, but from that day
forward there would be no rewards as long as I was their teacher. And so ended my own brief
romance with empty-child pedagogy.
14 When you come to understand the absolute necessity of scientific fraud, whether unintentional or deliberate, to
the social and economic orders we have allowed to invest out lives, it is not so surprising to find the long catalogue
of deceits, dishonesties, and outright fantasies which infect the worlds of science and their intersection with the
worlds of politics, commerce, and social class. The management of our society requires a stupefying succession of
miracles to retain its grip on things, whether real miracles or bogus ones is utterly immaterial. To Mead, Burtt,
Kinsey, Freud, and de Chardin, might be added the recent Nobel laureate James Watson, double-helix
co-discoverer. Watson’s fraud lies in his presumption that having solved one of the infinite puzzles of nature, he is
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