RSS
Home
Paying kids to learn: Even the French are doing it
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Bruce Crumley of Time has recently reported on an experiment with monetary incentives for students at three vocational schools in Paris. This is not the first experiment of the sort, and like most of them, is remarkably timid. For example, student cannot get cash, but must only purchase educational materials. That is really unnecessary. Students should be treated like any other kind of workers in our knowledge-based new economy. If we want them to learn something they would rather not learn, we have to pay them real money, with no restrictions. If we don’t want to pay the money, this means we don’t really need them to learn. This is as simple as that. The economy of schooling based on semi-forced free labor of students is losing its steam. It just cannot deliver the needed effort on the part of students. And because most people do not realize that, we live in the age of increasingly utopian thinking about education, with its incessant search for classroom super-heroes, and for convenient villains, like teacher unions and teacher education schools.
But it is not about heroes and villains, it’s the economy, stupid. And what we have as the school economy, is not working – not because we underfund our schools, but because we can’t figure out how to make the learning labor of students profitable for them.
