What price pupil progress? Recently, a Scottish chemistry teacher who had been working at a secure unit in Glasgow was reprimanded by a panel for “paying students to finish assignments”. 

Joseph Kyrollos put money into students’ bank accounts to encourage them to complete their work. Other staff at the school reported that pupils at the unit were “regularly paid money by staff as a reward”.

Should hard work be rewarded? Yes. Does your school have a rewards system? Most likely. So why does a story like this generate such a strong reflex? 

“How to destroy love of learning and demean education,” one teacher commented online. And this feels true: we want education to be its own reward, not to be framed as an economic transaction. 

Not a single economy

“Everyone knows the price of everything,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “but the value of nothing,” hinting at the fact that there is not one single economy and that complications arise when these get muddled. 

The American writer Lewis Hyde has written extensively on how the “gift” economy works differently from the “market” economy, and explores this idea through the exchanges connected with food.

Imagine being invited to have dinner with friends. You are welcomed into their home, sit around a table to share food that they have prepared. 

At the end of the evening, as you put on your coat to go, you ask your friends for the bill. “What do I owe you for the food?” Nothing could be more rude. 

Now imagine going to a restaurant, sitting around a table that has been carefully prepared. At the end of the evening, there’s no way you’re going to call the chef over, thank them for the meal, and try to get a date fixed to have them over to yours for dinner.

The joy of the imbalance

Hyde would want us to tease out the real difference here. In both situations, food is given - but it is the relational context that impacts what the appropriate balancing mechanism is. 

In the restaurant, this occurs with money: once the cash has been paid, we are all square. The market economy is satisfied: we have had food, the chef has had compensation, and this balancing removes any ongoing relational requirement.

At the dinner party, there is no cash-for-food: it is a gift. What this means is that at the end of the night the scales are not balanced. Dinner has been provided, but nothing has been paid for in return. 

The joy of this imbalance is that it leaves a relational debt that then circles round and strengthens the bond: the favour will be returned at some point, perhaps in some other form, and so the “gift” travels on, deepening relationships.

(Interestingly, we have a weekly cake club in our staffroom, and there is definitely a different feel to it when this is fulfilled through shop-bought, rather than homemade, cake.)

If education is a gift...

Drawing on this, I’d argue that the discomfort about paying students to complete work comes from an idea that education is part of the gift economy, not part of the market economy.

As it moves, it doesn’t immediately balance itself with cash, but builds capacity in relationships and constructs a community, a society.

Yet things are not that simple. The other key writer on gift is Marcel Mauss, who argues that no gift is ever offered in a purely altruistic way. 

However much we are in the job to pass on the gift of knowledge, we do want to be paid at the end of the month. All of us have likely used some kind of talk of “getting a good job that pays well” to try to cajole students into harder work. 

Focusing not on teachers but artists, this tension is central to Hyde’s book: the power of art is in the gift, and yet artists have to eat. This causes discomfort, and accusations of selling out for those who lean too far towards the commercial.

Hiding the economic value

How do we resolve this problem? Students should understand that hard work will be rewarded, and yet we absolutely should not be paying them for handing work in. 

Hyde would argue that the key is understanding that to sustain the power of a gift, its economic value should be hidden.

This isn’t to pretend that there is no market dimension, but to make sure that at the point of exchange, money is invisible - money isn’t immediately changing hands. The true value is preserved by masking the cost.

The wider problem that we face is sustaining this firewall. In a world of tuition fees, students seeking compensation for lectures missed, school cuts and financial efficiency, the market presses right up against the window of the classroom. 

Moreover, in a consumer society, the cycle of communal debt involved in gift exchange can feel uncomfortable. We almost prefer the simplicity of negating the relational dimension by coughing up cash. 

Stories like the one about Joseph Kyrollos remind us that the struggle to keep education in the realm of gift - the place where, like art, it truly has the power to transform - will require more vigorous and regular defence. 

It is our job to be wise enough about these twin economies to win this battle.

Kester Brewin teaches maths in south-east London. While working as a teacher, he has been a consultant for BBC Education, and is the author of a number of books on culture and religion. He tweets @kesterbrewin