Paying Kids To Do Schoolwork

Jake Grover14 Jun 2026 3:15 UTC
5 points
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I think that the standard schooling system could be a lot better. This is for two main reasons:

  1. It’s slow.[1]

  2. It limits agency.[2]

This isn’t to blame the people who work in schools — for the most part they do a really good job with what they’re given. I just think that we can provide children with a much better experience — and it mostly comes down to motivation.

Learning takes effort — and while learning is often enjoyable, there are innevitably certain tasks/​subjects which students will dislike, but which are nonetheless very useful. The method that standard schooling uses to motivate its students is mostly through threat of punishment (having to do more work, notifying parents of poor performance), whereas the reward for doing well is mostly just praise.

I think that this method is missing a big component: actual rewards.

And the most straightforward way to accomplish this is: pay kids to do schoolwork.

It doesn’t, and shouldn’t, be a lot of money by adult standards. Their daily earning potential in dollars can be something like their grade level divided by 2 ($0.5/​day for grade 1, $6/​day for grade 12). They can then use their money to buy things from you like snacks, toys, et cetera.[3]

A day’s worth of schoolwork for a 10 year old could look something like this:

  • Write a short story ($0.25)

  • Complete a mathematics worksheet ($0.25)

  • Practice and perform a short piece of music ($0.25)

  • Read a map and answer questions ($0.25)

  • Memorise 10 new words in Spanish ($0.25)

  • Make a simple animation ($0.25)

  • Cook a meal ($0.25)

  • Learn a juggling trick ($0.25)

Not only does this serve as a powerful tool for incentivizing learning — by paying students to do work, we unlock a powerful tool for speeding up education: asynchronous learning.

That is, instead of everyone in a classroom learning the same thing at the same time, a teacher can assign a bunch of tasks and have students complete work and progress through content at their own speed.

This gives students a lot more agency over what and when they do during the day — and makes it so they will never be “left behind” or “held back” relative to other students in terms of how quickly they master specific subjects.

I learned about the concept of paying kids to do their school work from Edward Nevraumont’s review of Alpha School. Unfortunately, the idea of incentivizing students like this seems pretty taboo for most people, and Alpha School is the only place I’ve heard of which does it.

I want to be a parent someday and unless I can find a school which has this kind of rewards-based asynchronous learning, I’ll want to do homeschooling. Homeschooling does have downsides like requiring more time and effort — but I still think it’s worth it.

If you have any ideas/​experience with alternative schooling systems, I’d love to hear from you.

  1. ^

    Kids are mostly in lock-step with each other in terms of how quickly they progress through the content — and have little ability or incentive to go faster — at least until towards the end of highschool, when students can choose to do more advanced subjects. But even then they mostly still have to progress at the speed of the rest of the class.

  2. ^

    Chattel Childhood by Aella highlights how little grown-ups tend to respect the agency of children.

  3. ^

    You could also use fake money — or just directly reward with snacks, toys, et cetera, if you don’t like the idea of using real money — although I think that real money simply works the best.

Jake Grover14 Jun 2026 3:15 UTC
5 points
5 comments2 min readLW link