The son of friends of ours is required by his teacher to spend twenty minutes a day reading and report on doing so. He is being taught that reading is a chore to be done only under compulsion. Someone who follows the rules may never discover that reading is fun, since he will be cutting the book into twenty minute chunks instead of reading right through it. Our conclusion was that the best solution was to read the book and lie to the teacher, reporting a single two hours as six daily twenty minute sessions. The teacher, or whoever made the rules he is following, starts with the observation that reading a lot correlates with desirable outcomes and concludes that the way to get those outcomes is to compel children to read—whether they like it or not. The likely result is exactly the opposite of the one intended.
Years earlier, we observed a parallel mistake in a different context. Our home schooled daughter, considering a career as a librarian, volunteered to work without pay at a large local library. After a week they thanked her and told her that her term of volunteering was over. Pretty clearly, their assumption was that she was volunteering because her high school required her to, or possibly to get something to claim on her college application, and it was now someone else’s turn. Wanting to volunteer to do useful things is evidence of desirable personality traits. Volunteering because someone requires you to or will reward you for it is not. She found a smaller local library that actually had a use for her services and worked there for a couple of years.
For a third example, consider my previous post and the long comment thread. It is a good thing if people in the SCA are interested in learning what people did in period and trying to figure out how best to do it. But too often, people in the SCA are convinced that being historically accurate is not something worth doing for itself but something you do because other people are pressuring you to do it or in the hope of getting rewards and status. The result is “documentation” that consists not of trying to figure out how something was actually done but of trying to find some excuse for claiming that whatever you want to do is period. Sort of.
In each case the mistake is the same, the attempt to create the effect without its proper cause. To fake it.
Years earlier, we observed a parallel mistake in a different context. Our home schooled daughter, considering a career as a librarian, volunteered to work without pay at a large local library. After a week they thanked her and told her that her term of volunteering was over. Pretty clearly, their assumption was that she was volunteering because her high school required her to, or possibly to get something to claim on her college application, and it was now someone else’s turn. Wanting to volunteer to do useful things is evidence of desirable personality traits. Volunteering because someone requires you to or will reward you for it is not. She found a smaller local library that actually had a use for her services and worked there for a couple of years.
For a third example, consider my previous post and the long comment thread. It is a good thing if people in the SCA are interested in learning what people did in period and trying to figure out how best to do it. But too often, people in the SCA are convinced that being historically accurate is not something worth doing for itself but something you do because other people are pressuring you to do it or in the hope of getting rewards and status. The result is “documentation” that consists not of trying to figure out how something was actually done but of trying to find some excuse for claiming that whatever you want to do is period. Sort of.
In each case the mistake is the same, the attempt to create the effect without its proper cause. To fake it.
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