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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This idea goes in the opposite direction of what Daniel Pink talks about in his book "Drive"
( or TED talk here: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html</a> )<p>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.<p>Conversely, extrinsic motivators are still known to work fine for repetitive, "mechanical" tasks (think: assembly line).
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.<p>If a child doesn't have that parental pressure and support to excel, maybe money can be a decent albeit imperfect substitute.
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?
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?
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.
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?<p>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?
tldr: More experiments, please!<p>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.<p>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 <i>a lot of money</i>, 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...<p>As TamDenholm noted, the fact that we need to use such motivations for something as important as <i>learning</i> 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.
I don't know about the paycheck type scheme, but perhaps a growing grant for college based on your grades throughout your school career.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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?)<p>If you think 'no' is it because you think it is a bad example? It doesn't 'seem right'? How would you fix education?