So it has finally come to this: In the village of Noblejas in Spain, children are to be paid one euro an hour to sit in the library and read. It doesn’t matter what they read. Nor whether they grasp the meaning of what they are reading.
The idea is simply to entice children to spend time in the quiet space of a library surrounded by books in the hope that this will naturally lead them to develop a taste for reading and consequently learning.
If they are in the library, they are not lying on a couch watching TV, nor are they sitting behind a games console, nor are they chatting on the Internet, they are in a space where they can concentrate their thoughts and where reading stands a chance of seeming like an interesting pastime. It reminds me of an answer I often get when I ask people if they like to read: “Yeah I like to read, if I have nothing better to do.”
As someone who loves reading, I find it hard to conceive of relegating reading to something you only do as a last resort. I also find it hard to think of reading as a chore, which clearly is part of the message of paying children to do it.
But I accept that in today’s world, children are more easily interested in other pursuits than in reading and that something must be done to increase children’s exposure to the joy of reading.
This in essence is the thinking of the mayor of Noblejas. If you expose children to reading, reward them for it and pull them away from the nonstop excitement and stimulation of modern channels of entertainment, they will rediscover the joy of reading and all will be well. Paying them to read is designed to give them a foothold on the ladder of learning; it’s an enticement, not a bribe. He considers this a pioneering project, a pragmatic solution to a serious problem.
I disagree. Paying children to read is not a payment, nor a reward, but a bribe. A payment is when you pay someone for services rendered. It involves a contract of sorts; for instance if you wash my car this Saturday morning, I will pay you the price we agreed for the job. A reward on the other hand is a celebration, a recognition of achievement. You reward a child who graduated top of her class or a child whose hard work has achieved a significant improvement in his grades. If you pay a child — be that in money, sweets or other inducements — for doing something which they should be doing every day, i.e. learning, you are bribing them.
It is first and foremost a testament of failure. If we must resort to bribery, then we have failed as parents, educators and even as a society. A good educator — be they a teacher or a parent — should not need to resort to bribing children to instill in them a taste for reading and learning. Furthermore, parental authority should be enough to entice children to read, it should certainly be as effective as a financial inducement. Finally, the need for bribery shows that as a society we are not passing on the message to our children that reading and learning is a vital part of life. Reading is its own reward.
But most importantly, bribing children to read is wrong because it is counterproductive. What children learn is to expect to be paid in order to do something that is good for them. That is a very dangerous message to give to children. It instills a way of thinking whereby the only justification for doing something is material gain.
Unfortunately bribing children is commonplace. Parents regularly resort to the proverbial carrot in order to get their children into line — and you can hardly blame parents for opting for the path of least resistance. But it’s one thing to make the availability of treats conditional on good behavior, yet another to pay children to read. That in my view is taking it one step too far.
