o what about money for good grades?  What a marvelous incentive, one might think, for children.  In the City of Baltimore, for instance, we are told that students have been paid as much as $110 for improving their scores on the state graduation examination.  And lots of students did just that.  Is this not a win-win situation?  Students get money to spend; and the state gets to boast of higher grades.  Is this not enough to make an adult want to go back to school?  The remarks that follow are a reflection upon an article that appeared in "USAToday entitled: “Good Grades Pay—literally".

I think that this idea is a profound mistake.  The fact that school systems are resorting to this is, I believe, symptomatic of something profoundly problematic.  You see, the student-teacher relationship was once upon a time sufficiently personal that few things motivated a student like the approval and praise from the teacher. 

We were in school to learn; the teacher was there to teach us; and the relationship between teacher and student was such that in general the student was inspired and motivated by the teacher.  There was nothing like the marvelous feeling of satisfaction that came with answering a very difficult question or asking a very good question.  But there was also no substitute for the personal tie between students and their teachers.  I remember to this day the adulation I received from my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Owens, for asking a question about weather and the eye a hurricane.  He thought that the level of the question was way beyond my years.  And that was rather like the voice of God speaking because we all idolized Mr. Owens.

But there was a bond of trust between teacher and parent that made it possible for a Mr. Owens to have the influence that he had.  And we students knew it although we could not have put that trust into words. 

Well, it is no accident that teachers do not inspire like they once did.  The atmosphere in schools has changed radically.  In particular, the salubrious bond of trust between parents and teachers has all but evaporated.  Teachers are more like paid zombies, then human beings who are there to inspire students to learn.  We have become so concern with not making any mistakes with respect to any child that we are in fact making even a bigger mistake—one that is having an adverse impact upon all children.  This mistake consists in having a classroom that is shorn of the inspiration that can only be occasioned by a caring teacher.  The problem in a nutshell is this:

We have become so busy protecting students from the possibility of wrongdoing that we have lost sight of the importance of powering individuals to teach. 

And if that were not enough parents somehow seem to think that parental love consists in siding with their children no matter what—a line of thought that would have been downright incomprehensible when I was in grade school. 

Teachers commanded the respect of the parents of their students.  So it should come as no surprise that teachers commanded the respect of the children whom they taught.  We respected our teachers; we wanted their approval; and we delighted in the knowledge that they imparted to us.  Therein lied the ingredients for that combustible mixture called inspiration. 

We learned and ne’er a child got paid for learning.  I vividly remember writing a 15 page essay for, Mr. Mueller, my 10th grade biology teacher and a 10 page essay for Mr. Harmon, my 9th grade English teacher because I wanted to impress them.  I did just that; and the reward of doing that was priceless.

That is the point.  Money in fact cheapens the moment.  For the very point of learning during those foundational years should not be to attain money but to become excellent.  To introduce money is to sully the motivation that is essential to developing good moral character.  After all, if we are going to pay students to get good grades, why not also pay them to be moral.  Thus, a student who goes an entire year without getting any disciplinary points gets so many dollars; and the amount of $30, say, is subtracted for each disciplinary point that a student receives.  Clearly, something is wrong with that picture. 

These remarks apply without exception to parents providing monetary incentives.  There is much to be said for initially learning that being excellent is something that is to be appreciated in its own right.  Indeed, this sort of thing is called character building.  Of course, there is much to be said for earning money.  But in the immortal words of Solomon: “Unto everything there is a season”.  Significantly, children grasp the difference between simply giving a reward as a gesture of appreciation and being paid for doing something.  Parenting and teaching should keep that distinction alive.  There should always be appreciation for the excellences that we exhibit—an affirmation of the good that we have done.  But to pay students for learning as if that is their job is to make a fundamental mistake. 

There is much that we should learn but which no one will pay us to learn.  Indeed, such learning is the key to living well in all respects, both morally and intellectually.  There is, in truth, much learning about ourselves that we should do, but no one will pay us to do.  In fact, the very reason why the internet has been so wonderful for me is that it has served as a marvelous gateway to learning. There is much that I have learnt, thanks to the internet, but no one has paid me to learn; and on countless many fronts, I am indeed so much the richer for it. 

There will always will be a time when nothing makes more of a difference than that learning is its own reward—that intellectual curiosity that makes for marvelous discovery.  Paying children to learn is woefully myopic precisely because it is profoundly inimical to sowing those marvelous seeds of genuine intellectual curiosity the satisfaction of which is its very own reward. 

Cultivate in a child natural curiosity, and she or he will always be able to make money.  By contrast, if earning money is made the point of learning, then a child is apt to be bereft of the genuine intellectual curiosity that yields its own dividends if only because it gives rise to wonderful creativity in the face of adversity. 

Money is not, and cannot be, a substitute for natural curiorisity.  Those who support paying students to learn are engaging in foolhardy behavior whose legacy may be that of cultivating fools; for all that really matters to them is that both look good on paper.  And this the students know !