The Puzzle of Motivation: A Reflection on Dan Pink's TED Talk

I recently watched Dan Pink's TED Talk: The Puzzle of Motivation. The title of this talk caught my interest because I've been thinking a lot about the topic of motivation in my classroom lately. I don't know if it's the time of year - it's Spring and students have been completing state testing, or if my cooperating teacher and I have just become too lax with the rules, but the behavior in the classroom has become a little wild. I saw this TED talk posted and wanted to see what Pink had to say about motivation.
In our classroom, we use a token economy to encourage positive behavior - students earn fake money for doing homework, being respectful, helping others, etc. and discourage negative behavior - students lose money when they don't do homework, don't follow the rules, are rude, and so on. Everything I've learned in my graduate classes and read in books goes against using these behavior systems, and yet every classroom I've ever been in has one. It seems to me that these reward systems promote short-term behavior solutions, but fail to truly teach or motivate students. In order to truly motivate students, we have to create intrinsic motivation. We have to help them develop a sense of social responsibility and create opportunities for emotional development.
In this talk, Pink identifies the same discrepancy between what science knows and how we behave in terms of motivating people. He talks about business, not classrooms, but the idea is the same. He provides evidence that providing people with an extrinsic reward actually produces inferior results when asked to complete a task that requires some critical thinking. People are less creative and less able to solve problems when they are working toward an extrinsic reward. People who are intrinsically motivated perform overwhelmingly higher on cognitive tasks than people who are extrinsically motivated.
Pink's case points toward eliminating extrinsic motivation in order to encourage more creative thinking and, ultimately, better work. This, however, is where the argument gets tricky. It's easy to see why intrinsic motivation creates more creative thinking, innovation, and problem solving when people are doing tasks that interest them and that they want to be doing. However, what happens if we take extrinsic rewards away from people who are doing jobs or tasks that they don't have any interest in and they don't want to be doing? One of his key points is that for intrinsic motivation to work, mastery of the task or job must be seen as possible. I think this is an interesting point because it also applies to students in a classroom. Many students lack intrinsic motivation because they don't see school as something that they can or want to "master." The difference between business and school is that in the classroom, it's the teacher's responsibility to create interest and a sense that mastery is possible for everyone. If we supported our students by creating interest in academic activities, helped them feel like they could master these activities, and put more focus into character development, we could eliminate these behavior systems and see what wonderful things their intrinsic motivation brings them to do.