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.
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.
And I think rather than trying to bribe adults into doing work because they hate it it would be fantastic if we could try to make it interesting instead, so they would want to do it without compensation.
Of course, failing that, we have to pay them, because it's more useful to have a person do a dollar's worth of work for a "cheap" reason such as money than it is to keep the dollar in our pocket. Doesn't matter how nice it would be if the person really desired to do that work of their own accord, it's worth more to us to pay them than it is not to, so we do it.
Where's that analysis here?
From my interactions tutoring the hideously under-interested youth of America, at least the rich parents that care about such things would almost certainly be far better off (dollars and cents-wise) paying their kids a nominal wage to do their f-ing homework than they are paying me $80/hr to sit with them and force them to do it - even if I am there to answer the occasional question and review the material in a (hopefully?) more comprehensible way than the teachers might at school, in my experience the real gains are simply achieved by forcing kids to think about the topic for a certain amount of extra time every week, which they typically would never do on their own.
Basic reading, writing and arithmetic should be compulsory but let kids choose whatever they want to learn after that.
I'm all in favor of that idea. But you may underestimate the extent to which we're not even covering reading, writing, and arithmetic the way things stand. As educated people we tend to assume that everyone else is at least in the same ballpark as us, but look...those comments that you see all the time on YouTube, and chuckle at, assuming they're written by non-native English speakers? They are, in fact, pretty close to the average quality of the prose you'll get if you ask an average classroom of American students to write an essay.
All of those are true. The American public education system is actually based on the Prussian education system. John Taylor Gatto writes about this in "Against School" and argues that this education system is actually designed to make the public mass more "manageable." It also helps to turn us into major consumers.
I think the problem with nowadays education is they are very bounded with curriculum. Schools shouldn't be a place just to learn, but also to have fun, socialize, make friends.
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).
This theory has ramifications not only for paying students to go to school, or for good performance, but also whether grades are ultimately harmful to long-term student learning and comprehension. The research suggests that students who perceive getting good grades as a reward for studying tend to view learning as a performance or competition, not as a quest for mastery or self-fulfillment. When they graduate into the real world and are no longer rewarded with grades, they tend to stop learning, because the extrinsic motivator (grades) is removed. They also tend to "study for the test" and forget the lessons soon after, as the goal is always to perform well on the next exam, not to retain knowledge.
Not all extrinsic motivators appear to be damaging to intrinsic motivation. For example, the researchers (and those who have continued Deci's work) found that encouragement and praise were extrinsic motivators that often reinforce, or at least sustain, intrinsic motivation. The theory is that people (especially children) lose intrinsic motivation if they think they're being manipulated by the external reward: verbal encouragement and social acceptance are supposedly less transparent means of motivation than, say, money or grades.
Before reading this part of the book, I had thought that perhaps paying students for good academic performance was a good idea. Now I wonder if perhaps paying parents for their child's good performance is the right way to go, accompanied by a short course on developmental psychology for the parents.
(1) Young children are compelled to act by rewards/punishments. (2) Older children are compelled to act because they respect their parents' directions, even if they don't understand or agree with the directions. (3) Young adults choose to follows their parents because they understand and agree with the directions.
The point is that young children are just not cognitively able to appreciate adult reasoning. Yes, it's great if we can get 2nd graders excited about multiplication tables, but that's usually not possible.
On a slightly more meta level, it seems like TED and Gladwell are making more topics bikesheddable.
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.
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.
it reminds me of an article I read about some organization doing scientific studies on charity. I wish I had the link handy.
There was once instance where people would charge people in 3rd world countries a nominal fee for HIV medications, thinking that the compliance in taking the medications would increase if you assigned some non-zero value to it. they did a formal study and found that it was less effective overall than just giving away the medicine.
If a child doesn't have that parental pressure and support to excel, maybe money can be a decent albeit imperfect substitute.
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?
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.
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 think 'no' is it because you think it is a bad example? It doesn't 'seem right'? How would you fix education?
