I was attending a meeting with an educational group. One of the members of the group mentioned that they had found an innovative way of punishing those students, who were found guilty of misconduct. He elaborated on his excitement thus: ‘When someone is found guilty of misconduct, he/she has to perform a fixed number of hours in community service.’ I could not hold myself back from interjecting him and said: ‘Community service as a punishment? Don’t you think a person should be subjected to it as a reward for something good that he/she has done, rather than as a punishment?’ Ignoring my question, he said: ‘This point is beyond the scope of this meeting. Secondly, we have had great results from it. We will, therefore, continue doing so.’ And that was the end of the discussion on this point.

I am strictly against the idea of controlling behavior through the Skinnerian or the Behavioral model of Rewards and Punishments. Much has and will be written and said on it. Today, my surprise at this idea of subjecting a perpetrator to mandatory hours of ‘community service’ forced me to write. It needs to be acknowledged at the start that this is not a new idea and may find its roots in the idea of the rehabilitation of criminals.

Without delving into the philosophical aspects of this point of view, there is one aspect that makes one cringe: Do we want to promote ‘community work’ in our young, as a punishment? A punishment, as the current social paradigm holds, is something that a wrongdoer is subjected to, which is considered humiliating and socially degrading. The whole idea can be summed up as follows:

When I have done something wrong, I should be subjected to an act that would make me feel more humiliated and degraded, compared to the pleasure I had gained from my initial ‘wrong’ doing.

Now, think about the whole idea again. Do we want to promote community service in our young as representing humiliation and social degradation? Shouldn’t it, to the contrary, be promoted as representing a special privilege that only the fortunate ones are allowed to undertake? As already mentioned, I am strictly against the behavioral idea of behavior modification, but it was only with this in mind that I had dared to ask: Don’t you think a person should be subjected to it as a reward for something good that he/she has done, rather than as a punishment?

We are so overwhelmed by the Skinnerian school of stimulus and response that we have completely lost sight of the fact that the element of perception that lies between the stimulus and the response plays a pivotal role in the ultimate and the long-term development of the human being in question. It is quite possible to get the desired response from the subject in the short-run (because of our control over the stimulus), yet in the long-run such stimuli, because of misperceptions (or simply different perceptions) on the part of the subject, can sometimes lead to results that are very different from what we had originally desired.

 

December 18, 2019
(Lahore, Pakistan)