How the power of ownership can help change education

There is a Jataka tale about a merchant and two apprentices. To the first, he promised a bag of gold at the year’s end if trade went well. To the second, he gave the bag of gold on the very first morning, saying only that it was now his to guard and that a coin would be docked for every bargain he bungled. Both stood to end the year with the same purse. Yet, it was the second apprentice, clutching gold that already felt his own, who rose earliest and watched every coin as though his life depended on it.Also Read: From schooling to skillingThe old storytellers were making a point that runs deeper than money. We do not labour half so hard to win a distant prize as to protect what is already in our hands. Ownership changes us. Being trusted with something and told it is ours to lose summons an effort no promise of future reward can match. Long before the economists arrived, the fabulists knew that people rise to what they are entrusted with.Modern experimentThat ancient intuition is one of the most robust findings in modern behavioural science, and it carries a useful lesson for how India might think about its teachers, its students, and the machinery of trust we call an education system. In 2010, four economists (Roland Fryer, Steven Levitt, John List and Sally Sadoff) tested the merchant’s instinct in nine schools in the U.S. Teachers were offered a bonus of up to $8,000 tied to how much their students improved. One group would receive it at the year’s end, as usual. The second was handed roughly $4,000 up front, in September, on one condition: the money was theirs, but they would have to return it if their students fell short.Same money, same target. The teacher afraid of losing it taught better than the one hoping to win it. Traditional year-end bonuses had failed for years in the U.S., producing gains indistinguishable from zero. But the teachers who held the money as their own, and stood to lose it, lifted their students’ Maths scores by 0.20 to 0.40 standard deviations, the kind of leap you would otherwise get only by replacing an average teacher with an excellent one. Nothing had changed except the sense of ownership.It would be easy to read this as a memo about clawback contracts, but that misses the point. The finding is not about fear. It is about the strange power of ownership: how differently a person behaves the moment something stops being a possibility and becomes a responsibility. The task for anyone who leads an educational institution is not to manufacture fear but to cultivate its healthier twin: the feeling in every teacher and student that the outcome is already, unmistakably, theirs to protect.Indian equivalentThis is not a foreign curiosity to admire from a distance. India has run its own test. In 300 government schools across Andhra Pradesh, economists Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman worked with the state government and the Azim Premji Foundation to offer teachers a bonus averaging 3% of annual pay. Over two years, student achievement rose by 0.27 standard deviations in Maths and 0.17 in language, with none of the feared side effects. Teachers who felt real ownership of their students’ progress taught better not because they were threatened, but because the improvement had been made, visibly, theirs.The impulse is spreading in gentler forms too. Himachal Pradesh notified a State Award for School Teachers Scheme in 2024 that shifted recognition toward “learning outcomes and quantifiable indicators”. The instinct is sound, and its careful word (recognition, not punishment) points to the real lesson. What moves a good teacher is not the threat of a docked coin, but the dignity of being trusted with something that matters, and of being seen when she guards it well.The stakes are not abstract. India’s teaching workforce crossed one crore in the 2024-25 UDISE+ count, the largest on earth, yet the same data records close to 10 lakh vacant posts in centrally funded schools, with shortages of 30-50% in some Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas. We are at once the world’s biggest teaching force and desperately short of teachers. When one teacher carries the load of two, what makes her pour herself into the work is not a luxury of economics. It is the whole game.Money alone has never been the lever. The Panchatantra warns of the man who cut open the goose for its golden eggs. A system that leans too hard on fear and cash to extract short-term marks may kill the love of teaching that no bonus can buy back. The Andhra scheme worked partly because it rewarded improvement relative to similar peers rather than a blunt pass mark, so no teacher was punished for a weak intake, and none was tempted to abandon a struggling child. Design, not generosity, made the difference. Trust, not fear, did the real work.How to apply itFor students in universities, colleges and higher secondary schools alike, the same truth applies to your own effort. You will study hardest not for a grade dangled in the distance, but for goals that already feel like yours: the streak you refuse to break, the project you have claimed, the standard you have decided is non-negotiable. Ownership is the engine. Learn to hand it to yourself, and no external incentive will be your master.For faculty, the deeper message is not about pay at all. The finest teachers already carry an internal version of the merchant’s contract, treating each student’s potential as something they stand to lose if they teach carelessly. That freely chosen sense of ownership, the conviction that this class is mine to get right, is worth more than any bonus a system could design. It is the quiet mark of the vocational teacher this column has praised before.For university leadership, the lesson is to build ownership rather than fear. Give your faculty genuine authority over what they teach and how they assess it; make them custodians, not employees. A grant framed as “yours, to be earned by completing the programme” respects that instinct; a punitive scheme that manufactures anxiety buys a season of marks at the cost of a decade of goodwill. The tool is double-edged, so it must be wielded as trust and never as a threat.For the academic bodies, the message is about the yardstick. Ownership only motivates when what is owned can be fairly measured. If your assessment cannot credibly tell whether a cohort has genuinely learned more, no scheme of recognition, however well-intentioned, can point teachers in the right direction. The integrity of the ruler must come before the reward for the result.Behavioural economics is fashionable and it is tempting to treat its findings as buttons that dispense learning when pressed. Education is not a vending machine. Read carelessly, the American experiment says, “threaten your teachers”. Read wisely, it says what the Jataka merchant knew all along: the apprentice worked harder not because gold could be taken from him but because he had been trusted with it; given something real and treated as capable of guarding it. Fear was the crude mechanism. Ownership was the true cause.India’s task over the coming decade is not merely to fill its 10 lakh empty desks at the front of the classroom. It is to make each teacher who stands there feel that the learning of every child before her is already hers to protect, and to build the fair measures, honest recognition, and genuine authority that make such ownership possible. Do that, and we will close the gap one guarded lesson at a time. The purse was never the point; the trust always was.Views expressed are personalThe writer is the Vice-Chancellor of RV University, Karnataka.