Punishing Failure, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Asian kids rarely miss school. Common sickness is not an acceptible cop-out. To be sick enough to get the ‘okay’ from the parents to stay home, one would literally have to have a dementia inducing fever, exhibit signs of an advanced stage of leprosy, perhaps even demonstrate the coughing of blood, before getting a very reluctant acceptance that, God forbid, maybe, just maybe school would be out of the question that day. In elementary school, for several years in a row, I received the “Perfect Attendance Certificate”, an honor shared between only myself and roughly three-quarters of the other Asian kids in school. I sometimes wonder about how many countless other children we needlessly infected as walking, breathing carriers of disease. It makes me chuckle.

I could probably count the number of times I’ve missed elementary school on one hand, perhaps even without the use of my more opposable joints. Boy, was I a miserable sight those days. I had to be. I’ll admit, though most of it was genuine maladiction, much of it consisted of showboating, just so my parents could know that I was truly, beyond a reasonable doubt, sick. My mother fashioned herself a medicine woman, a healer, an expert on Chinese remedies – she still does, as a matter of fact, in spite of the fact that she has had absolutely no training in the subject, save some extended gossip sessions with the wife of the local accupuncturist. She used to make for me a strange black concoction, calling it a several thousand year old ‘traditional ginger cure’. From what I could understand, it was a mix of several different herbs – and more ginger than any living soul should consume in a month’s time. If you’ve had ginger before – raw – imagine that taste multiplied by a factor of a hundred. Yeah, that’s about how bad it tasted. I dreaded it. I forced it down, and I tried to wash the taste out of my mouth. It never worked, but that never stopped me from trying.

I got sick again recently. I did my best to make no signs of it during the Chinese New Year celebrations, but a sneeze and a sniffle gave me away to Inspector Mom. Guess what the first thing she said to me was as soon as she figured out I wasn’t feeling well? “I’ll make you the ginger soup.”

Liquid dread. “No, mom, it’s okay, please, none of that, I have NyQuil.”

She’s never liked the fact that I’ve never really had too much faith in Eastern medicine. No, actually, that’s not entirely true. She’s never liked the fact that I’ve never had faith in her Eastern medicine. “But it’s always cured you within one day when you were young!”

I sighed. It was time to come clean. “No, mom, it’s never cured me. I just hated it so much because it was so disgusting that I would rather go to school sick than drink it. It tastes that bad. And I know you just made it up. There’s no medical research that indicates drinking your ginger soup will cure anything. If it actually cured the common cold, you wouldn’t be keeping it a secret. We would have patented the formula, extracted the vital ingredients, created a pill, bribed someone in the FDA, and made millions of dollars while saving the American economy millions of dollars in lost productivity. In fact, if anything, your ginger soup was worse for society as a whole because it would scare me into going back to school without having fully recovered and infect all the other kids.” Yes, it was time to let her have it. I was an adult, and, goddammit, I was going to stop her from ever inflicting that torture she called a cure on any more living souls.

She made it anyway. “What? You’re not going to drink it? You’re going to make me waste good ginger and other expensive Chinese medicines?”

I drank the ginger. Goddammit.

She asked me later on if I wanted more. I fought off my Pavlovian gag reflex from imagining the taste of the soup. “No, no, no, it’s quite alright. I’m not sick anymore.”

“Good,” she smiled. “And you didn’t believe it would work.”

———

A few years ago, George W. Bush signed into law the “No Child Left Behind” act, establishing a system of accountability for public school districts that would, ideally, motivate educational administrators to implement reforms for trailing schools and improving the academic performance of certain minority demographics. In theory, it’s a good idea. In a free market system, key performance motivators are the expectation of rewards for success, and the fear of being punished for failure. Public educators, have long been criticized for being too protected by tenure programs and union bubble shields. The No Child Left Behind act specifically detailed a plan for reducing funding for schools that failed to meet a federally set benchmark, and called for “restructuring” consultants to come into a failing school to clean house if needed, in effect turning the school in question into an artificial corporation specializing in the production of students at every grade level producing strong standardized test scores.

Years later, we are beginning to see some very adverse side-effects to this system. Teachers and administrators in difficult school districts, afraid of losing what little federal funding they were receiving, began cheating for the students. Rather than keep more problematic students in school, counselors would advise students to drop out rather than bring down a school’s average. And these are just the tip of the iceberg.

At the very core of the problem is the philsophy behind punishing failure. In a free market system, a corporation assesses all the risks behind a particular market before investing to overcome any barriers of entry. The reward for success is a net increase in funds, and the punishment for failure is a net decrease in funds. After too long a period of decreasing funds and incurred debt, the corporation goes out of business. Similarly, when an employee performs well, his employer rewards him with prestige and bonuses. When the employee underperforms, he does not gain the bonuses, is possibly demoted, and eventually, fired, unless he leaves first. That’s the beauty of a free market system and free market employment: “at will” production of labor – there is always a chance, even if infinitely small, of a company going out of business. When the company goes out of business, if there is any kind of demand for the commodity it produced, another company will rise in its stead to produce the commodity, perhaps at a lower quality and lower quantity, to avoid sharing the fate of its predecessor. The system of punishing failure, thus, only works if the ecology allows for extinction and adjusted repopulation.

Public education does not and cannot fall under this umbrella.

The public education system cannot go out of business. Nor can it afford to offer anything but service of the highest caliber. As much of a Libertarian as I am, I believe very strongly in class mobility and accessibility to quality education as a vehicle to that mobility. In order for a Democracy to survive the entropic nature of a free market economy’s tendency towards Oligarchy and no-compete monopolies, education must always be available as well as improving so the next generation can invent the Next Big Thing to unseat the Last Big Thing. Unlike the commodoties and franchises with limited life-cycles produced by corporations for consumption, the supply of education must never, ever drop below the demand for it. Any generational respite in producing educated workers in a First World market will lead to an absence of the growth of new, marketable franchises, and subsequently economic implosion.

My mother is not a stupid woman. In fact, she is very, very sharp. I’ve long suspected, for instance, that her ‘ginger soup’ is a punishment for my not being careful enough to avoid getting sick, and my fear of having to drink it subconsciously drives me to be extra careful with personal hygiene, dressing appropriately, and in general avoiding environments which facilitate the spreading of disease. Certainly, my reported incidents of sickness have decreased. But what of its effect on my actual increased precaution towards staving off sickness? Questionable, at best. The same applies to the No Child Left Behind act and its approach towards motivating by way of fear. The conspiracist would argue that it is in the interest of the ruling class to oppress the masses by way of depriving us of education, while at the same time looking like heroes for ostensibly increasing test passage rates (and the particularly vile would argue that my mother does not actually care about my well-being as much as she cares about not having to hear about my lack of it). We need public education reform; there is no doubt of that. It’s time to move on. Fear of punishment has not created the results public education so desperately needs. It’s time to throw “No Child Left Behind” in with all the other failed social experiments.

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