Has higher education become all carrot and no stick? Are we so tolerant of what some of our learners produce – or don’t produce – that discipline hardly exists any longer? Have absences become normal after Covid and the global fuel crisis, excused by the fact that we are now living in an abnormal world? Defining what is acceptable and unacceptable has become hard, almost impossible. The lines are blurring between right and wrong, reasonable and unreasonable. Some students appear to take advantage of blended courses in order not to work when activities are online, coming back with various excuses for late or missing work.
I see all carrot an no stick. We seem to be turning a blind
eye to outrageous behaviour in order to appear sympathetic and caring. We are
urged to be tolerant until our patience is strained. We overlook absences in an
effort to project empathy. We use clear rubrics for grading, which, if applied
strictly, could fail large numbers of students. How many of us are actually
failing the lazy joyriders? The carrot wins.
We even receive e-mails asking us to give certain “struggling” students
more time on exams. Some of them don’t seem to be struggling at all; they will
use any means to maximise their chances.
The treatment of younger school children has followed
similar trends. When corporal punishment was replaced with arduous tasks such
as writing the homework ten times, people objected, and detention is now more
common instead; yet even that is frowned upon by many who argue that instead of
punishing kids one should motivate them instead, as a preventative measure.
While motivation and rewards are important in education, unacceptable
behavior needs to be phased out. A study on reward and punishment at Washington
University has shown relevant results: “ Reward
and Punishment Act as Distinct Factors in Guiding Behavior”. More
importantly, punishment has a more decisive role in changing behavior: “Given
the well established behavioral effects of rewards and penalties …, one would
expect that the larger a reward, the higher the tendency to repeat a choice,
and the larger a loss, the higher the avoidance rate. We found that this indeed
is the case for rewards …, but strikingly, there is no modulation of the effect
by the magnitude of a penalty. A loss drove a uniform avoidance of the choice
that led to the loss” (Kubanek, Sneider & Abrams).
Educators need to balance the carrots out with more sticks, especially
now, post-Covid.
