A distant benefit needs a reason to matter now

The argument

A second argument for this position concerns how the rewards of schooling are distributed over time. Proponents point out that almost all the benefit arrives years later, in the form of qualifications, work and options, while all the cost is paid immediately in boredom, effort, early mornings and the loss of whatever else the day could have held. Adults find this trade-off easy to endorse because they have seen how it turned out. A child is being asked to accept a sacrifice now against a payoff they cannot picture, on the authority of people telling them it will be worth it. On this view a payment supplies what the arrangement otherwise lacks: a reason that operates on the timescale the pupil actually inhabits. Proponents argue that this is the ordinary way societies get people to do demanding things whose value is diffuse or delayed, and that nobody considers it corrupting elsewhere. Adults are paid for work they would not otherwise do, offered allowances for training, and given tax relief for saving; the principle that a present incentive can support a distant good is uncontroversial everywhere except in schools. Proponents add that the payment can carry its own lesson. A child who receives money for showing up, meeting a standard or completing a course encounters directly the connection between effort, reliability and reward, which is among the things schooling is supposed to teach and which is otherwise entirely abstract to someone who has never earned anything. Handled as earnings rather than as a bribe, they argue, it models the relationship between work and payment that the pupil will live inside for the rest of their life. On this account children should be paid to go to school, because a distant benefit needs a reason that reaches them now.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the comparison with adult wages breaks down, because an employee produces something for an employer whereas a pupil is the beneficiary of their own schooling; paying someone to accept a gift is a strange arrangement. They also argue that it mistakes which motive is being built. Encountering the link between effort and reward matters, but the reward schooling offers is capability, and substituting cash teaches a different lesson: that the capability was not reason enough. Others note the practical trap, since an incentive that works has to keep working, which means maintaining or raising it indefinitely, and a payment that becomes expected stops motivating anything while costing the same.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics object that children manage other delayed rewards without payment, so the timescale alone does not establish the need for one. [Rejecting P2] They argue the comparison with wages fails, since an employee produces something for an employer whereas a pupil is the beneficiary of their own schooling. [Rejecting P3] They reply that the lesson actually taught is that the capability was not reason enough, which is the opposite of what schooling intends. [Rejecting C] They conclude that an incentive which must be maintained indefinitely to keep working is not a solution to the problem described.