If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
Interpretation
Monetary rewards for reading may diminish a child's intrinsic enjoyment and understanding of literature.
In this quote, Michael Sandel warns against the practice of incentivizing children to read through monetary compensation. He argues that doing so can create a harmful expectation that reading is solely a means to an end, rather than an enriching and valuable activity in itself. This approach risks overshadowing the inherent joy and educational value that comes from reading, suggesting that treating literature as a commodity undermines its true worth.
In practice
In a workshop about childhood education and literacy, this quote can be used to discuss the importance of fostering a love for reading.
First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others.
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.
The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.
There's so much more to tell about Africa than the usual stories about war, famine and disease.
I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.
The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.
Ideally, schools should be supportive environments for students. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies tend to funnel vulnerable students out of schools and into prisons, low-income jobs, and poverty.
Long live teachers of children, because they can show children how they can save the world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.