Should kids be paid to complete their homework assignments? This debate continues to surface in parenting magazines, school districts around the nation, and now on the homepage of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency – well, sort of. Turns out that a number of religious educational initiatives aimed at college students are paying participants to explore the Bible, Talmud, and a variety of other texts. Some people are outraged at the prospect of paying people to explore their own religious heritage, but for rabbis like shlomo levin who are doing the paying, it makes perfect sense.
Arguing that it makes more sense to pay students to study than it does to spend those same dollars on marketing initiatives, meals, and a variety of accompanying programs designed to attract prospective students, those behind these initiatives would rather give the money to the students themselves as a reward for their participation. And I have to say, as a rabbi, a teacher and a parent, I totally agree.
The idea that paying people to study somehow “cheapens” both the study process and the texts that are being studied, strikes me as totally wrong and for a whole variety of reasons. First, how can any teacher, rabbi, or minister who is paid to teach, object to the notion that students should be paid to learn? If we deserve to be compensated for our own investment of time, why shouldn’t the students also be compensated? Perhaps not at the same rate, but still.
We all know that in fact, students in the later stages of education are often compensated for their study. We may call them graduate fellows, seminarians on a stipend, or kolelniks (a blended Hebrew-English’ism for advanced students in rabbinic academies), but in each case they are paid to study sacred texts. So why not extend some version of that financial reward system to students at earlier phases of the process?

Could it be that those who object to paying beginning students for religious study actually feel that such study is like the spinach that must be choked down before one “earns their dessert”? If so, then they need to ask themselves why spiritual study should ever be experienced as spinach, and ask how that reality can be corrected so that students would consider the rewards of such study to be greater than the couple of hundred dollars currently being offered by these programs.
Which brings us to the crux of this matter i.e. the disconnect between the study of sacred texts and the perceived value of such study in the minds of those that the teachers would like to attract. The payments are necessary because the credibility of such study as a means of upgrading one’s life has been so damaged for so many prospective students. That’s not the fault of the students. That’s the fault of those who teach this material.
When study, be it grade school assignments or religion classes for collegians, is connected to the real needs which the students themselves perceive, then no such payments are needed. It’s why kids who enjoy reading don’t need to be paid to complete their summer reading assignments and why young adults who enjoy religious study need not be paid to read the Bible. But when such study doesn’t meet an already perceived need on the part of the student, then incentives which address those needs they do experience must be offered instead.
In other words, there is no such thing as study for its own sake. We study because we like to, because it opens up new intellectual and spiritual worlds, because it advances our career goals, brings us honor within a chosen community, or even because it connects us to God. When none of that happens, either the study ends or we create new incentives.
And rather than curse those who take advantage of such incentives or those who offer them, we need to offer those incentives in the short term, and then we need to ask ourselves whether or not that which we are teaching is really on target if it continues to demand such incentivization.