The "hopelessly lazy" as you put it, are simply rational people whose marginal productivity (attainable wage) is lower than than their available free resources. Very few children will voluntarily work if allowances are withheld, unless they can earn enough to replace parental support. Very few unproductive workers (ignorant, unskilled, uneducated, incompetent, hostile or disobedient) can earn more than they can from welfare, crime, or vice. By varying the rewards of education, welfare, crime, and vice (and not changing labor market conditions) we can shift the proportions of people in each of the categories, but we cannot drive many of the to work for the jobs available right now. Welfare, crime, and vice make their consumers worse and less marketable over time. Education, on the contrary, makes them more employable. If we are not willing to change the labor market to create better paying jobs, we ought to educate and train the unproductive workers to become more productive. And we ought to fix the labor market so the more productive workers who become educated can get the jobs they need.
No one --- no one -- is motivated by fear of failure. Most people are incapacitated. Many studies (Edwin Locke, etc.) show that people who have have attainable goals assigned to them, achieve them far more often than goalless people. Far more students in supportive environments succeed, far more often than people who are threatened with failure. Every experienced teacher knows this is true and most of them, who want their students to succeed, try to support their learning. There are some (very, very few) masochistic and self-punishing students who must be flogged or worse to get them to obey (and learn), and there are sadistic (very few) teachers who enjoy punishing their students by failure.
The single, most needed reform in education is payment of teachers by results -- with huge bonuses for major successes. Measuring success is tough. The second most important reform is separated teaching and examination. Teachers should be rewarded for getting students through evaluations (examinations or assessment). A student who gets a high SAT or into Harvard or MIT deserves a $100,000 bonus. He should be required to pay it out to his teachers as he wishes. Popular teachers should be allowed to contract with their students -- "I'll give you $20,000 to tutor me in physics if I get in to MIT and earn the $100,000 bonus!" "Ok, e=mc^2 ..." With graded bonuses down to Bob Jones University (you pay the Board of Education $20,000!). With the right prices, it should be possible to eliminate teacher salaries altogether, and the teachers left would be very, very good. Really rotten stupid students would have to leave school. Students and teachers would have a common interest in academic success.
We can even have sports, with bonuses by football colleges, and organized baseball and the US Olympic committee (distributed to coaches). |
