High school dropouts will supposedly be a thing of the past with the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) newest brilliant idea of paying students to show up to class. The idea does have precedent, though. In some states in the US, students can get a fat cheque for anything from perfect attendance to scoring well on tests. However, the TDSB only hopes to implement this cash reward in poorer areas of Toronto, as a way to “battle poverty.”
When I heard about this, I immediately recoiled from the idea. However, before I go off on a rant about why this is philosophically and ethically just plain wrong, let’s look at the basic idea behind this whole scheme.
The premise is “encouraging a good behavior by rewarding it,” and the easiest reward should be money, right? The simplest reason a student can receive money is for good attendance. Schools in the US that have implemented the system offer students up to $50 for perfect attendance.
Such systems may not only be highly ineffective, but also highly dangerous. Suppose that a student misses one day of school due to illness, or an extenuating circumstance. There goes the reward. In fact, schools in the US that have done this have found that the mechanism actually backfired, especially in poorer areas, because of accounts where children from poorer families were beaten by their parents because these children failed to acquire their due reward. For children, and for “on the brink” families, $50 is quite a lot—the same incentive behind the reward may ultimately be a child’s downfall.
The other option is to reward students for their good performance. However, you and I both know that there’s a lot more to ‘performance’ than just hard work. Remember those grade twelve days when suddenly every university-bound student at your school was a keener who was itching to get that extra five percent in any way possible (regardless of whether or not the student was actually interested in the material being taught)? Do we really want to unleash the same environment to students from grade nine and onwards? What the enthusiasts for the money-system are overlooking is that marks aren’t always indicative of deeper learning. Perhaps the first ten percent might be true—that is, going from a 40% to a 50% might mean you learned something. However, when a system to reward marks with money is installed, students might resort to other methods of getting easy marks—including cheating. What students are going to learn from such a system is that it doesn’t matter how much you know. It only matters how well you do.
Moreover, isn’t such a scheme only teaching students a love of money, not a love of school? Students aren’t being taught to love knowledge and education for knowledge’s sake—instead, education is being used as a conduit for money. What is to stop a student from realizing that although she could be getting $50 a term for perfect attendance, she could be making ten times that much money by dropping out and getting a job? And frankly, in schools, students should realize the value of knowledge for its own worth. We might be going to school to get a better career but we also need to remember that education leads to a better quality of life because it’s education. Education and knowledge are cures for a variety of circumstances, including ignorance (the reason why subjects like social studies and history were mandatory in high school), better health (why you had Physical Education every week), and better communication skills (doing horribly in the Language Arts does not make the subject any less important). Getting a better paying job is definitely a bonus, but it should not be the primary motivation behind getting an education.
Besides, by paying students to do well, we may actually be discouraging students from doing their best to only doing the bare minimum to get a passing grade, or a mediocre mark. Are we really striving to nurture visionaries and inspire creative thought—the two factors that should be academia’s number one priority—by providing money for school?
And frankly, it’s a bit surprising to hear that school boards have their coffers full of free money they can hand out to students. Most school boards are suffering due to their lack of funding. Class sizes are bulging. Many elementary schools have over 30 kids per class. Many school boards can’t hire enough teachers, don’t have budgets to promote many after-school programs, and can’t get enough funding to replace decades-old books in libraries. Instead of paying a school of one thousand students $50 each, why not use that money to hire more teachers and staff members so that students receive better one-on-one attention? Why not use the money to increase school field trips to actively engage students in their learning? Money can be used for a wide variety of options, such as purchasing more musical instruments, increasing the number of working computers in schools, and even setting up programs like before-school breakfast programs for poorer students. Directing money into projects such as these will promote the idea that school is a safe, nurturing, and a fun place to learn.
None of this is considering the impact that the money gimmick will have on post-secondary education. What will students do once they realize that after being paid their entire life to go to school, they suddenly have to shell out twenty grand to get educated?
It might be simplistic to think that ‘students should go to class because they realize the value of an education.’ It is true that not all students might necessarily know or understand this value, especially not students who come from poorer areas. However, offering money for going to school is not the solution. Offering money does not help students understand the value of school; it only increases their appreciation for instant gratification. School should not be treated like a job or an ATM machine.
And frankly, there are plenty of children across the world in impoverished countries who would love to go to school, but don’t have the money. And now we’re considering offering children who have the right to an education money to acquire this education? Canada might have 99 first-world problems, but spoon-feeding education should not be one of them.
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