Sunday, February 6, 2011

How are lessons best learned? Do people learn lessons more fully and have them sink in on a deeper level when those lessons are mastered by soft or by hard means? Allow me to elaborate.

Say a person is speeding along a highway, aware that they’re going too fast, but continue to speed. Checking their mirrors, they manage to stay under the radar until a cop finally catches them. The driver when asked if they knew they were speeding, admits to their offense, not in a cocky manner, but in a shoulders shrugged and yah, you caught me one that impresses the officer enough to let them off with a warning instead of the deserved ticket. My question is this. In the long run, would the driver benefit more from having been issued the ticket or from the leniency of the officer who cut them a break?

Each and every day, people find themselves caught in situations where they make choices. Some of those push the envelope and border if not cross the line of being illegal, while others are downright way over the line. Sometimes the individuals get caught and are made to pay for their lack of better judgment and mistakes. Other times, like with the lenient officer, they are allowed to walk away with only a warning. Still other times, the person never actually gets caught but is made to endure the guilt of knowing what they did. So here again, I pose my question. Is it better for a person to be caught, made to pay for their offense and then allowed to learn. Or can people manage to self-correct their wayward behavior with no intervention from others or outside sources?