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Can Kids Be Bribed to Learn?

Time magazine ran a very interesting cover story this week on a Harvard economist named Ronald Fryer Jr. who studied what would happen if kids were given money for doing well in school. In some instances it was for reading, while in another school it was based on grades and attendance. The results varied, but what the Fryer found was that the kids who were paid to read and attend school did that, and improved their test scores at the end of the year.

Of course, Fryer met with a lot of resistance--mainly from psychologists who argued that students should learn for the love of learning and not for money.

Funnily enough, this argument sways me towards Fryer's way of thinking.

I don't work because I love to work. I work because I need money. Most people in America right now hold the jobs they hold because they need money, not for the love of the job.

Amanda Ripley, the author of the Time article, points out several times that it's almost as if we're holding kids to a higher standard than adults. While they're growing up, we bribe them with stickers for potty training and treats for good behavior, but in school we expect them to behave and perform hard for no reward at all.

Something not mentioned in the article was that in many instances we're asking kids to embrace their education without convincing them that their education is actually going to be worth anything once they're out of school. Kids are stupid. They understand what's going on in the country today. If any time was a good time to teach kids the value of what they're learning, now would be the time.

Can you convince a kid that physics is actually going to help him if he doesn't plan on going into a field directly related to physics? I took Chemistry in high school and it hasn't helped me a day in my life, because it wasn't in a field I pursued.

In college, you're rewarded for picking your major early and getting on the track you need to be on rather than jumping from field to field, but in high school and the lower grades, you're expected to dabble and excel in at least five different fields.

Doesn't it seem sometimes like the education system is a game with constantly changing rules?

If the focus of school is to prepare kids for the real world (and perhaps hope they develop a love of reading and writing) then what's wrong with suggesting that they should be rewarded for their hard work the same way people are in the real world?

Even the worst job has a paycheck--and many of the kids in the study weren't given all that much. $4 dollars was enough to incite students in one school to read an entire book. Maybe it won't inspire a love of reading, but from working in a library I can tell you that kids who don't love to read rarely ever decide to read after having it forced upon them in school. In my opinion, anyone who has ever made it through four chapters of Biology should certainly be rewarded in some way.

Of course, this is all sort of silly since the money to pay these kids would come from--where? But what Fryer is saying is that we need to give kids real incentives to learn.

Maybe it doesn't have to be money, but what it should be is a direct connection between learning--

--and earning.

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