

Should Kids Be Paid to Do Well in School? - keltecp11
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1978589-4,00.html

======
TamDenholm
I think rather than trying to bribe children to go to school because they hate
it they should instead concentrate on making school actually interesting.

Personally i feel that most school systems are factories that teach kids to be
test takers, not question authority, not think for themselves and do it the
way they're told because thats the way its always been done.

How about we provide some intrinsic motivation instead, make school
interesting. Basic reading, writing and arithmetic should be compulsory but
let kids choose whatever they want to learn after that.

I also dont think we really need teachers in specific subjects, generalist
teachers that work with kids to support them could help a child create his own
curriculum, the internet makes this a very real possibility these days.

~~~
sievert
I thought that's how it works everywhere? I'm from NZ, you must take English
and Maths up until a certain age, otherwise just pick your other four subjects
and enjoy.

~~~
Jach
What's the variety for your other four subjects? If you can take a year of
nothing but physics (or computer science) in high school/junior high, then NZ
rocks, but I'd guess they're just giving you an illusion of choice while still
forcing you through the general education classes since that's all there is.
Not to mention prerequisite hell plagues all hierarchical forms of education
and if you don't have understanding administrators it's really hard to move
ahead when "you're not supposed to."

------
hoop
This idea goes in the opposite direction of what Daniel Pink talks about in
his book "Drive" ( or TED talk here:
<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html> )

What Daniel Pink says is that extrinsic motivators (such as money,) have
actually been found to be _harmful_ to performance when used to reward
cognitive or intellectual activities. I would imagine "getting an education"
to fall under this category, but maybe not so much.

Conversely, extrinsic motivators are still known to work fine for repetitive,
"mechanical" tasks (think: assembly line).

~~~
shawndrost
And yet, the results in this article show extrinsic motivators to be
beneficial to performance on some cognitive activities. Seems like it's an
area that merits more research.

On a slightly more meta level, it seems like TED and Gladwell are making more
topics bikesheddable.

~~~
hoop
Re: Meta - Perhaps, although the talk on Daniel Pink was something that was
first shown to me in a class. After seeing it, I decided to read his book on
my own time.

Also, for anyone who is interested in the book, I recommend just watching the
video as it sums EVERYTHING up. The book just provides slightly more evidence
and explanation.

------
DevX101
Most young children don't fully understand WHY they need a good education.
Many students that do well in school in the early years, did so because their
parents forced them to study.

If a child doesn't have that parental pressure and support to excel, maybe
money can be a decent albeit imperfect substitute.

------
KleinmanB
After basic education (up until highschool) why not let kids pick what they
want to learn. Forcing people to do anything after puberty is fruitless. You
dont see high school football coaches having to force the kids to stay on the
team. Why is education any different?

------
buddydvd
Back in elementary school, my math teacher gave out virtual money (in the form
of xeroxed monopoly money stamped with a special seal) to students who
completed homework assignments and those that did well on tests. One day out
of every week, he would bring a bunch of goodies (e.g. mechanical pencils) to
class and auction them off to the highest bidders with these monopoly money.
The auctions were very enjoyable since it was interesting to see people
outbidding each others in the process. Being much of a saver myself, I
accumulated a huge sum of these monopoly money and kept all of them in one of
my 3-ring binders. One day, I discovered someone stole all of them while I
left my backpack unattended. After telling my teacher about it, he told
everyone to open their backpacks and inspected them. However, we never found
out who stole them and it sucked because after that incident, I started to
distrust some of my friends. I think this system could be improved if the
rewards were non-tranferrable. Perhaps someone can build a web application
that lets teachers employ such technique and allows students to accumulate
money in the digital form?

------
aaronblohowiak
No, kids should have jobs. If kids have jobs that suck, then they will want to
work harder at school so they won't have a sucky job when they graduate.

------
sp4rki
The hell no. As DevX101 said, children don't understand why they need to get
an education in the first place. This creates the impression that going to
school is a job when it most certainly is not. There is a difference between
offering an occasional prize (a toy, lunch, or event) because a kid did well,
and making them believe they are entitled to get paid because of their
performance in school. There's also the fact that I believe it can hinder the
natural curiosity a kid may have by introducing a mitigating factor in the
process of choosing his/her interests. Lastly there's the fact that some kids
are - sadly - complete imbeciles. Are this kid's not going to get payed
because they did badly, even though they might have even tried a whole lot
harder than the other kids?

I say, let the smart kids be smart, let the dumb kids be dumb, let the in
between's be regular children. Hell imagine every kid becomes a "smart" kid
because of payment; can you imagine the surplus of people in comparison to
employment opportunities in the "brainy" work sectors?

------
Jach
tldr: More experiments, please!

I'm all for more experiments in this area, since we need them to combat our
bad intuitions and simple conjectures, and as others have noted we especially
need to find out what happens to these kids when you take away the rewards.
Considering that atheists don't fall into extreme immorality after rejecting
their religion, I'm willing to bet that most of the kids wouldn't just fall
back into old patterns or become worse off than before, even though this
doesn't make me intuitively comfortable... Again, we need experiments.

There's also some slight bitterness I feel that others around here might
share. We're smart and we made it through the system without these nice
monetary rewards. $95 a week? For not dressing like crap and not talking back
and doing some trivial homework? $95 is _a lot of money_ , I never got that,
and when I worked 20 hour weeks at a grocery store one year my weekly
paychecks were roughly $120. People should just be motivated to learn on their
own without these rewards, and the whole grading system in general helps to
undermine this...

As TamDenholm noted, the fact that we need to use such motivations for
something as important as _learning_ is more a symptom than solution of an
underlying problem with the education system. The point in the article about
how they desire to foster intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards made me
do a double take. Yet the solution still isn't "let the students do what they
want", because most will do the minimum, and then schools will cut budgets and
staff, and with only "generalist" teachers you get generally shallow teachers
across all subjects. I'll agree that some teachers can teach more subjects
than one and many classes can benefit from a mixture that only a special
generalist could adequately teach (it always bugs me when math teachers admit
their ignorance on the uses of complex numbers), but we really need
specialists. The college model is correct here.

------
erreon
I don't know about the paycheck type scheme, but perhaps a growing grant for
college based on your grades throughout your school career.

Could be done using game dynamics and you earn points based on your work then
at the end of high school you can convert those points into paid credit hours.

------
hga
Here's one nasty detail that should be taken into account: some fraction of
parents will just confiscate the payments from their children.

------
sliverstorm
If you provide a source of external motivation, they will never find the
motivation within themselves to learn, and thus will be screwed as soon as you
remove that external motivation.

In other words, as soon as you stop paying them to learn, they will stop
learning. You set them up for failure by removing the chance to learn to be
self-motivated.

~~~
jessriedel
This is exactly the kind of conventional wisdom that needs to be actually
tested, rather than assumed.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yes, you're probably right. I'm just always stumped by the part where you
can't try a dry-run in educational theory- you actually have to try it out,
and you run the risk of screwing up a kid's education.

~~~
jessriedel
Seems easier than the situation in medicine. I have fewer moral qualms about
testing experimental educational techniques on students than I do about
testing experimental medicine on patients, especially if the students (or the
students' parents) are compensated by an amount that make them willing
subjects.

------
waterhouse
Link is to the fourth page of the article, rather than the first. I'd gently
suggest fixing that, or avoiding it in the future.

------
keltecp11
There have been a lot of studies about this lately... if you think yes, why?
Is it because kids today do not necessarily need teachers for answers like
kids in generations past (due to the internet?)

If you think 'no' is it because you think it is a bad example? It doesn't
'seem right'? How would you fix education?

