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.
Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.
Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.
There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
You want to ensure people can do it right 99 percent of time. When we have to fire one of our surgical trainees, it is never because they don't have the physical skills but because they don't have the moral skills - to practise and admit failure.
I have vowed to my God to teach the heathen, though I be despised by some.
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
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