Money is many things, and we can't take away the fact that it's one of the things that motivates people to always give their best wherever they find themselves. My mentor once told me that when words fail to motivate people's productivity, create a healthy competition with monetary rewards, and people will push themselves just to earn more, no matter how little it might be, which would eventually boost their productivity.
I remembered the years I worked as a supervisor, when my salesmen would go the extra mile just to secure their incentive, which comes with accomplishing 30% of their monthly target in addition to their monthly targets. It's quite difficult to make that happen, but these guys always push to the very last day of the month to claim their incentive.
There was a particular day I thought about it because the incentive isn't something that lucrative, but these guys do not mind spending extra hours daily on the field because the money will surely take care of some of their responsibilities. Using money as a reward anywhere would motivate people, but it can have a positive or negative impact if introduced as a reward for academic excellence.
While money has the power to motivate, let's not forget that it can also make people do terrible things, and the negative effects of introducing money completely as rewards in school might outweigh the positive impact in the long run.
I feel like a lot of things are at stake because students might deviate from learning to understand to learning just to get the monetary reward at the end of the session. While it would inspire some students to relieve their parents of some financial challenges, therefore helping them to improve academically, it may as well lead to an overemphasis on grades, which would eventually crash the already weakened education structure in my part of the world because students will only be focused on grades instead of truly acquiring knowledge, and there is no way we can prevent this from undermining the intrinsic value of learning and personal growth.
As a student and teacher, I have seen what students are capable of doing, and with a cash reward attached, the goal at the end of every school session might end up being just to secure the bag. I wouldn't even be surprised to see students working with teachers just to get the money, and they will end up sharing the reward, meaning an undeserving person will eventually go home with the reward.
At my former place of work, I discovered that people engage in different messy acts just to secure their incentives. Imagine a salesman crashing the price of a product with the intention of using some of the incentive to balance the difference. It might look smart, but that isn't the case, and that's against sales etiquette. What I am trying to say is that people will always abuse the system, and that wouldn't make any sense.
I am not saying money can't still be used as rewards in schools, but instead of handing cash out as rewards for academy excellence, it can be converted into scholarships, which would create even healthier competition.
In my few years of working as a teacher, I met lots of kids whose parents couldn't afford their tuition fee, and despite the challenges these kids faced, many of them were toppers in their classes, which means rewarding them with scholarships if they top their classes will help them secure uninterrupted study time in school.
Schools can give out study materials as rewards, and this is a way of reinvesting in students who have the potential to use their knowledge to make a great impact on society someday.
As much as money would be inspiring and appreciated as a reward, I do not support giving it out to students to prevent the degradation of education in the long run because sooner or later acquiring knowledge wouldn't be as important as going home with some money at the end of every school session.
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