Pajamas Media

12 Comments

If one has to be paid in order to do something, then the thing isn’t inherently rewarding. Bribes, whether the immediate payment or the promise of a long term payment, disguise the fact the learning is satisfying. Human beings love to learn - except when they are in school. Figure out why and you’ll figure out how to fix education.
I’m a homeschooling granny. I preserve my granddaughters’ love of learning.

Read an article from Edutopia.com
http://www.edutopia.org/pay-prizes-reward-student-performance

The article says using a monetary reward system works in some cases and not in others. Two problems they mention are that performance drops after the rewards are ended and for poor families, the money may be taken from the child for other uses (legitimate and illegitimate).

Personally, I feel it is the parent’s, not the school’s, responsibility to decide on the type of reward system they use for their children. Many parents pay for grades, plan special activities for good report cards, or take away privileges for poor grades.

The school already has a “reward” system; grades. Unfortunately, many students are not motivated by grades alone. If we want to pay a student for his performance, set up a scholarship fund in his name and deposit money that can be used after graduation.

Alice,

I insist rather strongly that my employer pay me to do my job. If I weren’t paid to do this job, I’d be doing something else with my time rather than this. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t inherently rewarding. Likewise, as I explained above, I readily admit that education is inherently rewarding - but should your granddaughters really not care at all about whether learning more now will help them put food on the table later? Would it be wrong for them to think about how learning more now will make them better off later?

Or are the victories of Olympic athletes somehow less noble because they’re showered with fame, honor, and endorsement contracts worth many millions of dollars? Isn’t the tangible reward for success part of our recognition of the inherent worthiness of the activities we reward?

We humans always have mixed motives. Even when we do things that are inherently rewarding, we’re also thinking about our own well being.

How about this: If my son does well in school, he gets to keep his weekend job, which rewards him with 350.00 earned dollars a month. If he does not do well he gets to shut off his PS3, and loose his job. With the job he buys his choice of school cloths, without it he gets what pop buys him. School is too easy these days and the teachers are running a popularity contest which means if a student sucks up to them they get good grades, hardly a reason to reward someone. Material rewards teach material living, and not responsibility. Working for the right to work something my son will be doing for the next 50 years teaches priorities and necessities.

Greg wrote: “but should your granddaughters really not care at all about whether learning more now will help them put food on the table later? Would it be wrong for them to think about how learning more now will make them better off later?”
That many years hence is incomprehensible to them now. They learn in the here and now because learning is inherently interesting. I tie what we are studying to something meaningful in their lives. No bribes, no lectures about what this will do for them in the long run. When a lesson goes flat, I either put it aside for another time or make a note to find another approach. Lessons frequently evolve into things I didn’t anticipate because of their interests and questions. And because they are so interested, it goes very fast.
What do you make of the research that Alfie Kohn cites in his book, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes? I tend to believe him because what he argues matches what I observe in life.

[...] the other side, Greg Forster makes the case for bribery on PJ [...]

[...] Foster nails it at Pajamas Media.  “Admit it,” he writes, “you don’t care about whether it works nearly as much [...]

Alice wrote “If one has to be paid in order to do something, then the thing isn’t inherently rewarding”——> Do you mean like a job ? I have 3 little ones andwe tell them just like we, the parents, goto work everyday, they do have a job, called school. My entire life poeple gave me things to do good in school, started with smiley faces, stars, gifts, why not money !

School is work for kids.

Eric wrote - “My entire life poeple gave me things to do good in school, started with smiley faces, stars, gifts, why not money !”

You go to school to get good grades, that’s the reward! NOT MONEY. Good grades get you into a good college, a good grades there will get you a good job to make the good money.

Bribing children to do what their parents should teach them to do is a sad pathetic nanny state mentality. Having to get schools and the taxpayer to pay them for what they should do is a screaming failure of parents to guide and teach their children responsibilities.

Eric is clearly in a different galaxy than most of us. Good grades=more opportunity to do what you desire and get paid for it+more options available for living the life you want instead of the life that you have to live because you didn’t get good grades.

“School is work for kids.” Yeah, right.

The problem I have with this is that this money will come out of the tax payer pocket and my community funnels way too much money into education as it is.

What about the large body of research showing that if you promise kids a tangible reward for an enjoyable activity, they tend to lose their interest in the activity and start focusing on the reward as the be all and end all. What about in addition the large body of research that has found that the more a topic interests you, the more you learn, the more deeply you understand it, and the longer you remembers it. And what about the research, as well as the experience by teachers and folks like Alice, showing that kids are eager and curious about the world, and love to become competent and acquire skills? All this research points toward spending our resources on high-quality teachers who can capitalize on kids’ intrinsic interest in learning, and show them at the same time why it’s in their interest also to learn subjects they’re not initially interested in?
Much of this research is referenced in books I’ve co-written like Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning, and Pressured Parents, Stressed-out Kids — as well as this oped in the LA Times last week: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-grolnick5-2008sep05,0,2652576.story