Why Should We Not Pay Students for Good Grades?

If we try to make a society who thinks that studying should be paid, as if it is work, hence no fun, then yes we can pay each students a certain amount of money based on their performance. But we we want a society who loves to learn, and would learn something for the sake of learning, then we'd better not associate money, or work to studying at school.

There other ways money could be used to help lower drop out rates, and to motivate kids at school:

• The money would better be used to pay teachers' training, who would then learn the skills to show that learning is exciting. Student would in turn have better chance to love to learn.
• The money could also be used to increase the salary for teachers, therefore attracting higher educated individuals to want to be teachers.
• The money could also be used to give more unemployment benefits to unemployed professionals who are willing to give their time to help teach school kids from their experience.
• And how about giving tax breaks to corporations who allow a certain number of their employees to use their work hours to go to schools to tell stories about what their schools have taught them, and how that helped them to get to where they are in their profession.

Praise the Hard Work, Not the Intelligence

Should we praise our kids' hard work or their intelligence? Should we make our kids believe that their failure is based on lack of effort of lack of ability? The answer is hard work, or lack of effort. It turns out that less emphasis should be given to intelligence and or lack of it, because believing too much on one's intelligence prevents one from living up to one's potential, and believing too much on one's lack of intelligence depresses motivation. As parents, we need to praise the hard work of our kids, and at the same time help kids understand the consequence of lack of hard work. For more, read The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.

The video below shows a research on how praising the hard work makes children want to work harder but praising the brilliance makes children more unable to cope with failure.