Journal #3

Incentives to Attend School

The most common incentives that most school use are grades, these grades reflect your overall performance. Your parents deduce from these grades the kind of punishments or benefits that you may get. Some disincentives that they use are the threat of kicking you out, holding you back a grade, and making you retake a course. Rewards are a much better incentive. Think about it this way, if you are the student and you aren't coming to school, you obviously don't care about it, or don't value it highly enough to come. But with a reward, it suddenly pops up on your radar, and now you have a reason to go. If you just give a punishment, it doesn't matter to the student, if they are already missing school, they don't care if you hold them back, or fail them, or kick them out, it would be of no consequence to them. All of the incentives for me to attend school are implemented in the home environment; for example, if I get a bad grade, my mom will cut me off until I make some sort of amends. They are ridiculously effective, when everything that you would be doing instead of studying become taken away, you are forced to study. I feel like the incentives given at PAS don't affect me, because I don't really care about what the school has to offer beyond the basics, and whatever that I strive for, as far as the school giving out free stuff, that doesn't matter to me. The goal of the schools is to get money from the government. PAS has a different school because they don't receive funding from the government, they are trying to please the parent by getting their child into a good college.