elise

"One day on coming into the school I saw a child sitting in a little armchair in the middle of the room, all by himself, doing nothing; on his chest he wore the pompous decoration that the teacher had prepared as a reward of good behavior. The teacher told me that this child was being punished. But a moment earlier she had rewarded another child, pinning the decoration on him. And this child, passing beside the culprit, had passed the decoration on to him, as though it were something useless and in the way of anyone who wanted to work. The culprit looked at the decoration with indifference and then looked tranquilly about him, evidently without feeling his punishment. This was enough to show the vanity of rewards and punishments, but we wished to observe the children for a longer period, and after a vast number of experiments we found the fact so constantly repeated that the teacher ended by feeling almost ashamed both of rewarding and of punishing those children who set no store by either reward or punishment." --Maria Montessori