Paying students to do well in school is rather like paying for sex. That no doubt seems crass. Alas, I think the analogy is right on point. To have a regular habit of paying for sex is to forge the wrong kind of association between sex and money. Sex cannot possibly have the kind of affirmation that it should have if it is only via the exchange of money that a person has sex. No amount of money can make sex an expression love.
Paying students to excel in school forges the wrong kind of associations with respect to excellence and, in so doing, pay students to excel in the classroom gives rise to the wrong kind of character formation. There is something absolutely extraordinary about taking pride in the fact that one has excelled in a given task. And when learning is at its best, this is precisely what happens. In turn, taking pride in what one does is a character trait that will serve a person well for the rest of her or his life, and in every aspect of her or his life. It will get a person through the good times and the bad times. It will incline individuals to put their best foot forward whether everyone is being wonderfully supportive or woefully discouraging.
There is nothing on this earth that can compete with or take the place of a person taking pride in the work that she or he does.
Imagine paying some to dress in a way that is becoming. This borders on being ludicrous precisely because what we suppose is that we should take enough pride in our appearances that we are naturally inclined to dress in a way that is becoming. Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong if a person needs the incentive of money to dress in a becoming way.
Learning is one thing. Performing a service is quite another. An individual can rightly demand to be paid well if she or he performances an important service well. Yet precisely what one wants, of course, is an individual who will perform well the services for which he is paid well even if he can get away with doing a rather poor job.
I take pride in being able to engage my class of 400 students my course Ethics and Value Theory. It pleases me greatly to see the innovations that I have introduced into the classroom. It is not my salary that has given rise to those innovations, but the pride that I take in my teaching.
What we want is a world in which children take delight in learning and in being able to think of novel ways in which to do things. We want a world in which that kind of self-motivation is a defining feature of the character of the lives of children. Quite simply, paying children to excel is not the way to achieve that end.
To suppose otherwise is to labor under a delusion. It is to ignore the difference between results and motivation. What is more, it is to pretend that an unsavory motivation for achieving excellence in learning can be or become a salutary one.
People point to the success of the program by drawing attention to how much more students in pay-for-learning programs are motivated to learn. Really? How exactly do they distinguish between those who are motivated to learn and those who are simply motivated obtain money?
It would be quite a testimony in favor of pay-for-learning programs if it could be pointed out that after a semester or year in such a program, children forget all about the money and fully take delight in the pursuit of intellectual excellence for its own sake. It is so obvious that this sort of confirmation is needed that the failure to look for it stands as formidable evidence that those who run pay-for-learning programs are delusional in their assessment of its positive benefits.
Quite simply, how could they possibly know that pay-for-learning programs are giving rise to the right sort of character development in the absence of a sustained committed to excellence on the part of students who were once in such a program but no longer are. There is simply no other result that can possibly speak to the success of pay-for-learning programs.
There is a truth that has stood the test of time, namely that money cannot buy love. This truth applies with no less force to the ideal of taking pride in being excellent. This should not surprise anyone. Love can only come from the heart. It is no less true that taking pride in being excellent can only come from the heart.
There is this difference, though. Love is a gift that we first give to another. A commitment to excellence is a gift that we first give to ourselves. If this is last point is right, then paying students to learn is surely self-defeating. For the practice cultivates a dependence upon the other precisely where what one wants is the absence of such a dependence.
I am not one who is in love with all the ways of the past. Yet, we should not ignore the lessons that the past have taught us. And one thing that we know is that in the past hundreds of thousands of students have excelled in the classroom without any money whatsoever being offered as an incentive. That is an indisputable fact. This tells us that something rather fundamental has changed for the worse—and not merely that something has changed.
We would do well to identify what that change for the worse is rather than to entertain the foolish and implausible idea that it is simply the case that the times have change and money will make it all better. We know that this line of thought is just so much nonsense because we know that excellence in character has never had money as its foundation; and it is an incontrovertible truth that a commitment to excellence in learning is none other than an aspect of having an excellent character.
