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Get Good Grades, Win Cash and Prizes
All schools tell kids to study hard so they can make money. Why not admit it?
These days, if a child asks why he should care about doing well in school, what kind of answer does he get? He gets the same answer from every source: from parents, teachers, and school administrators; from movies and TV shows; from public service announcements, social service programs, and do-gooder philanthropies; from celebrities, athletes, and actors; from supporters and opponents of education reform; from everybody.
The answer is always some version of: you need to do well in school in order to have prosperity later in life.
Well, if you scrape away the sanctimony, what is this but a “bribe” on a colossal scale? Why is it vulgar and horrible to tell kids that if they pass their APs they’ll get a $500 check, but noble and uplifting to tell kids that if they pass their APs they’ll be able to get a better job five years from now?
Let’s quit kidding ourselves that it’s somehow shocking that somebody would come up with the idea of paying students to do well in school. For at least a decade, money is more or less the only motive we’ve been offering students to do well in school. We’ve just been insisting that the payoff has to come later in life. But morally, the timeline doesn’t make a difference. If it’s OK to pay someone five years from now to do something today, then it’s OK to pay him today, too.
Now, as it happens, I would prefer that the cash motive not be the only reason we offer kids to do well in school. I think our culture has been remiss in emphasizing education as an opportunity to become a better person, both morally (through character formation, a concern that the government school system seems to have largely dropped or subordinated, though private schools make it a top concern) and developmentally (because those who learn more and develop their capacities more fully have richer, more blessed lives).
But I also think that denying the presence of a strong financial motive in education is a fool’s errand. Kids will always care about how their education impacts their material well-being. And so they should — looking after one’s own material well-being is a good and natural concern.
Moreover, kids aren’t fully able to appreciate the moral and developmental motives for education until well after their education is complete. The 30-year-old, looking back, may well say, “If I hadn’t worked hard in school and had such great teachers, my personal character and my capacity for a fully human life would have been infinitely poorer.” But try explaining that to a ten-year-old.
To train students at all, you need to motivate them primarily with something that they understand. That means either “bribes” or punishments for failure. Bribes are the more humane option.
Of course the material motive is easily corrupted into greed. But that’s no argument for denying it. All motives are easily corrupted. The moral and developmental motive for education, for example, is easily corrupted into priggishness, arrogance, and self-righteousness — as anyone can find out by reading the schemes for education proposed in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, or, especially, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. (”Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them . . . we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)
If you’re still not convinced, ask yourself: How different is this from giving out prizes in competitions? And where has there ever been a civilization that didn’t reward success tangibly?
But there is one caveat I would offer to my support. Since large numbers of parents do in fact object strongly and persistently to this practice, it’s not good that it should be imposed on everyone without their consent. Not only does that violate the consciences of parents, it sends mixed signals to students and undermines their respect for parental authority. So it would be preferable if parents who object to tangible rewards for success weren’t required to send their students to school systems that offer them.
Yes, that’s right; all roads lead to Rome. This issue, like every other education issue, becomes, if you think about it long enough, yet another argument for you know what.
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Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
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12 Comments
1. Alice Roddy: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.
Sep 4, 2008 - 5:48 am 2. J.Long: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.
Sep 4, 2008 - 6:25 am 3. Greg Forster: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.
Sep 4, 2008 - 6:43 am 4. mina: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.
Sep 4, 2008 - 7:23 am 5. Alice Roddy: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?”
Sep 4, 2008 - 10:17 am 6. Paying students to do their job at Joanne Jacobs: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 [...]
Sep 4, 2008 - 12:30 pm 7. Pay Me My Money Down at The Core Knowledge Blog:[...] Foster nails it at Pajamas Media. “Admit it,” he writes, “you don’t care about whether it works nearly as much [...]
Sep 5, 2008 - 1:01 am 8. Eric: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.
Sep 5, 2008 - 4:34 am 9. Dave: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.
Sep 5, 2008 - 6:38 am 10. Richard Cook: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.
Sep 5, 2008 - 10:18 am 11. cshapiro04: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.
Sep 7, 2008 - 12:25 am 12. Kathy Seal: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?
Sep 11, 2008 - 4:51 pmMuch 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