Below you’ll find a draft article based on the second essay I wrote for my MA in Character Education (2022-25). My tutor was impressed with the essay and suggested I try to get it published. After expanding it into an article, I submitted it to the Journal of Character Education. This was my first experience of the peer-review process. One reviewer said accept the article outright, another said reject outright, and the third fell somewhere in between. The editor recommended making revisions and resubmitting the article. After a second round of reviews, the article was ultimately rejected. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the argument – it just wasn’t a good fit for the journal. Too theoretical, perhaps. Had I included some empirical evidence, the outcome might have been different. Two years later, I began gathering such evidence for my MA dissertation… but I am getting ahead of myself!
In this article, I pick up where my last essay left off – with the contentious issue of rewards in character education. I take aim at Marvin Berkowitz‘s argument that extrinsic rewards have no place in character education because they have been shown to undermine intrinsic motivation. I agree with aspects of this argument. I agree, first, with the underlying assumption that intrinsic motivation is essential for character development. In Aristotle’s words, an act is not virtuous unless it is chosen for its own sake. And extrinsic rewards have indeed been shown to undermine intrinsic motivation. Rewarding a child for drawing a picture, say, encourages them to see drawing pictures as a means to earning rewards. Crucially, however – and this is what Berkowitz’s argument overlooks – the undermining effect only applies to those who are already intrinsically motivated. Those who are not motivated are typically excluded from such studies.
Returning to character education, children who are intrinsically motivated to engage in virtuous behaviours have already attained a high level – perhaps the highest level – of character development, and therefore have little need for character education. Character education is needed most by those who are unmotivated to engage in virtuous behaviours. For these children, extrinsic rewards might play a positive role, perhaps as a gateway to intrinsic motivation. In the article, I argue that this proposition is at least theoretically plausible. Indeed, if extrinsic rewards can prompt an external shift in motivation in those who start off intrinsically motivated, it makes sense to suppose that engaging in an intrinsically valuable activity – a virtuous activity, perhaps – could prompt an internal shift in motivation in those who start off extrinsically motivated via rewards. I would later [coming soon] call this the “lure” hypothesis – the idea being that rewards might be used to lure unmotivated children into developing more intrinsic motivation for virtuous behaviours. In the article, I also begin to outline a potential empirical study to test this idea – an outline I would flesh out in my next essay [coming soon].