In India, Diane Ravitch notes on Forbes.com, students compete for admission into “cram schools,” paying up to $1,500 to prepare for exams that might get them into India’s highly regarded technology colleges. This puts in sharp relief the increasingly common strategy trying to persuade students to care about school with everything from cash rewards to New York’s planned “Game High School.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest? Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?
To be fair, to use the most ambitious students and families in India and elsewhere as an exercise in contrast is probably a bit unfair. There are no shortage of strivers in the U.S., the give-me-Harvard-or-give-me-death parents, for example, who push their kids into competitive schools and line up hot and cold running tutors in a bid for achievement or prestige. And no doubt, there must be indifferent and unmotivated studentsin India. Still, Diane’s larger point about what we stand for–and what we won’t stand for–is compelling.
The child that needs extrinsic motivation to act in his or her own best interest is at a decided long-term disadvantage to the kid who sees education as a means to an end. I suspect when the final analysis is in, pay for play will be to education what aspirin is to health care–something to mask the symptom rather than treat the disease.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. It is a disgrace to me as a substitute teacher to hand out fake money to students just for “being respectful” or for doing work that should just be done under normal circumstances. Nothing outrageously spectacular… nothing special…just normal work. (So I often will not give it out!). But I have also done my own research in this area, and there are studies that show several things (among others): rewarding students for mediocre work tends to lessen the chance for future high-effort/high creativity work, and that those students who can learn to look outside of themselves and care for others (instead of at how they can be rewarded for what they are doing) are often those who achieve at higher levels. I think that what we are doing by rewarding students with money, incentives, and the like masks not only a symptom in our society of a grave lack of motivation and willingness to put forth effort; I believe it also is attempting to mask a desperation (seeing in what direction as a whole our society’s students are going — not a very good one…) that should be being addressed in a very different way: one way I believe is for schools to become much stricter in their demands for performance. If a student does not try, then the student does not belong in school for the time. I know that is very radical, but perhaps then both students and the parents of students will begin to take the educational system and their own education a bit more seriously…and appreciate it more. Schools as I see them these days are becoming more and more of a daycare and place of socializing for students, with education being something they just have to do while they are there. Of course as stated in this writing, this is not for all students, but a pretty large quantity as I see it. The external rewards will probably not change what is going on internally in terms of students’ attitudes towards education, effort, and hard work…and hopefully it will not do more damage in the long-run. With sincere concern, Terri Liska