Most parents bribe their children - nothing particularly wrong about that, but it's usually a sign of desperation, seen typically in the run-up to exams in a frantic bid to compete with the attractions of a PlayStation or lying in bed. Does it work? Who knows? But anxious parents think it's worth a try.
In the same spirit of desperation, Frances Cairncross, president of the British Association, is proposing that schools and teenagers should share £500 bonuses for every A grade in A-level maths. Faced with a drastic decline in the numbers of young people taking maths to A-level, the country needs to do something, she told the BA's annual festival of science.
As she pointed out, if you haven't got a grasp of maths then a lot of career doors in science immediately slam shut and the same goes for economists (her own field).
Not only is Ms Cairncross rector of Exeter College, Oxford, but she is a former Guardian journalist and so we can be sure she knows what she is talking about.
There may well be huffing and puffing about devaluing education for its own sake with tawdry bribes, but it seems to me that in England, and to a lesser extent Scotland, we have got to the point where some constructive panic is needed. If an eye-catching scheme stirs things up then so much the better.
There are other possible objections to the Cairncross cash. Is it best concentrated on top grade maths pupils? Arguably if you are in the frame for an A at maths you are likely to be doing the subject anyway. It's the wavering Bs and Cs she needs to capture - they will make perfectly good economists and engineers and, indeed, the numerate citizens able to discuss global warming that she is calling for.
More fundamentally, will an incentive at 16 work? There are already inducements - though perhaps it's not common knowledge in schools that research by the London School of Economics has established that A-level maths will give you a lifetime's earnings premium.
The trouble is that too many kids have been turned off and become hopelessly muddled by the time they realise that maths could help their careers. Every maths graduate is the product of primary school teachers, as well as teachers further up the scale.
So yes, incentives for secondary schools, but the real solution to the problem lies with Ms X or Mr Y in primary year one.
At the very least she and her colleagues deserves a gold star from the BA, if not a share in the Cairncross bounty.
