Straight A students != smart, educated workers. The majority of students coming out of 4 years of college, regardless of GPA, have little to no understanding o

Straight A students != smart, educated workers. The majority of students coming out of 4 years of college, regardless of GPA, have little to no understanding of what actual productive work is without being told what to do (little executive function). Kids should not be bribed to do school work. If you have to bribe by definition we are doing something wrong. What's needed here is a refactoring of incentives. We should absolutely be paying kids, but they should be generating value. It's never too early to understand what generating value is, and everyone can create value (side note: profits are correlated to value now, but they are not causally related. We should work on that). Starting to work is a really important part of education, and shouldn't be thought of as what education is training you to do. Edit: And I don't think it should be like this, but generally speaking if you get good grades you'll have a relatively easier time in life and higher paying jobs so in that regard kids already are being bribed to get good grades they are just too stupid to see it.