The Core Knowledge Blog

In India, Diane Ravitch notes on Forbes.com, students compete for admission into “cram schools,” paying up to $1,500 to prepare for exams that might get them into India’s highly regarded technology colleges.  This puts in sharp relief the increasingly common strategy trying to persuade students to care about school with everything from cash rewards to New York’s planned “Game High School.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest? Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?

To be fair, to use the most ambitious students and families in India and elsewhere as an exercise in contrast is probably a bit unfair.  There are no shortage of strivers in the U.S., the give-me-Harvard-or-give-me-death parents, for example, who push their kids into competitive schools and line up hot and cold running tutors in a bid for achievement or prestige.  And no doubt, there must be indifferent and unmotivated studentsin India.  Still, Diane’s larger point about what we stand for–and what we won’t stand for–is compelling. 

The child that needs extrinsic motivation to act in his or her own best interest is at a decided long-term disadvantage to the kid who sees education as a means to an end.   I suspect when the final analysis is in, pay for play will be to education what aspirin is to health care–something to mask the symptom rather than treat the disease.