by Roger Crain

Created on: June 06, 2009   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

When I was a student during the 1960's, I had several factors going against my educational development. Foremost among these factors was a dysfunctional family life in which I didn't have that all-important supportive network in place to help the educational process along. Luckily, for me, I had the eventual encouragement of a mentor who enabled me to excel against all odds. Therefore, giving cash rewards to students for academic excellence voids crudely the educational process; and also, inhibits the student from developing honest scholarship.

Here's why:

1.) Offering monetary rewards or cash do not develop self-motivation. Being motivated is the hallmark of all students; but self-motivation is in a class all to itself. The only way to encourage students toward self-motivation is through sheer tenacity and true grit. Those qualities will only be developed when students are disciplined to the point of academic excellence by dedicated teachers who utilize passion whenever they walk into the classroom.

2.) Offering monetary rewards or cash creates a competitive environment. We are not far removed from those days in which I found myself a pawn in the hands of potential do-gooders who sought to make an unjust system fair and equitable. But all that happened was an environment that was too fiercely competitive and barren of those qualities such as tenacity and true grit.

3.) Offering monetary rewards or cash gives students false hopes. What we don't want to become is a society in which our future generation of leaders will be greedy corporate moguls and barren of those human qualities that will make our society an equal haven for all people.

4.) Offering monetary rewards or cash do not develop honest scholarship. Honest scholarship takes discipline and time to come full-flowered. That's why we need dedicated teachers in the classroom that would help any efforts at honest scholarship along. Only when students are learning per what our schools are teaching will we become that society that we ultimately want to become.

5.) Offering monetary rewards or cash stifled the intellectual development of students. Giving students money for academic excellence stifled their intellectual development; furthermore, it set students up to become a self-fulfilling prophecy by hindering their academic growth. What we need to do is to encourage our student populations to excel without the pseudo rewards of offering cash for getting good grades.

Finally, the factors of race and class barriers and growing up in a poor household coupled with the aforementioned factors that have been written about in this article are why children should never be rewarded with cash for getting good grades. Additionally, rewarding students with cash for academic excellence not only hinders their academic performance, but also stunt their intellectual development .

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