The Virtue of Incentives in Education

After watching Barry Schwartz's speech in class today, one of the thing that he said stuck out to me in particular. (You can view it here.) He told a story that served as a warning against relying on incentives to live a virtuous life. Apparently, in Switzerland citizens would ask if they would be opposed to having nuclear waste stored in their neighborhoods. Somewhat surprisingly, about 50% of them said that they would be okay with it because they felt like it was their duty as citizens. Here comes the crazy part. Another group of people were asked the same question, but they were also offered six weeks' salary as a compensation for the waste storage in their neighborhood. This time, only 25% accepted the plan. 
       This story clearly demonstrates a very interesting aspect of human behavior. We will agree to do something on strictly moral grounds until financial gain is brought into the picture. Then we suddenly take on a much more self-serving attitude and can no longer do the right thing based solely on what we believe is right an wrong. 
      Since I do not live in Switzerland and no one has ever surveyed me about nuclear waste storage, this specific example does not directly pertain to my daily life, but its message does. Our education system today is largely based on providing students with the incentives to learn. We receive grades for almost every assignment and we make a huge deal about final semester grades. For almost every student at New Trier, grades are a huge motivator to learn. 
     But why not learn just for learning's sake?
      To take myself as an example, I genuinely like to learn. I think new concepts are pretty cool. In Spanish, we are supposed to be learning how to speak another language, but sometimes I feel as if all that I am really learning how to do is get a good grade in the class. If we are assigned two pages in the workbook, I always do them, but I usually do not really put much thought into it. I do the minimum amount of writing so that I can get all of my homework points. I know that I am not the only person in my class who is guilty of this. But when I try to make myself feel guilty about blowing off my homework, I realize that the incentive of getting a good grade in Spanish really hurts my ability to learn properly. I truly believe that if I didn't have to waste so much time trying to get a good grade, then I could properly learn the language, which is something that I am interested in doing even without the grades (which is why I signed up for the class in the first place).
       My final point comes from the Chicago schools. Recently, they created a program that paid students for getting good grades. (I don't know what the current state of the program is, but the basic idea is still relevant.) I think that the problem with adding extra, unnecessary incentives to things is that the new incentives actually undermine the original ones. This "money for grades" program is telling students that getting good grades is not enough reward in itself. For that matter, grades in general send students the message that learning for learning's sake is not worth it. We need that extra validation from an outside source, rather than just being able to be proud of ourselves. I'm not sure that this is healthy.
      What do you think??