They Just Don't Care
Our school system ignores the science of motivation - and then blames young people.
I’m seeing lots of posts bemoaning that this group of Year 11s just don’t seem to care about their upcoming GCSEs. They aren’t motivated or worried about their speaking exams starting in two weeks time and nothing seems to make a difference.
This is exactly what would be predicted by the science of motivation. Motivation can come from the inside or the outside (or a mixture of the two). Standard schooling works on a principle of controlling children’s motivation. From the moment that children start school, adults are working to motivate them through rewards, sanctions, grades and approvals. They tell children that what they want to do is less important than what adults want them to do. They make them learn things which have no purpose to them, because they will be ‘important later on’.
This changes the purpose of learning. Young children learn because they want to find out and they are driven to explore the world. They ask questions because they are curious and want to participate. It’s hard to stop young children learning, and their learning is very individualised and frequently messy.
Adults try to make this linear, to make them follow a formal process. This isn’t how children naturally learn, and so they have to be controlled in order to do what is required. When we take away their choices and instead give them stickers and certificates to make them do what we want, then we turn learning into an exercise in compliance.
Now they aren’t learning because they want to find out, they are learning because they are being told that they have to. They don’t read because they love stories, they read because they have to do 15 minutes every night to tick it off. They are helpful because they might get an Achievement Point, or a 'Caught Being Kind' sticker.
The research shows that over time, this will damage their internal drive to learn and this is exactly what we see. They don’t ask why any more, they ask what will be on the test. They don’t choose a topic because they are interested, they choose whatever they think will be easiest. And over time, the stickers and stars lose their sparkle. It’s easy to control a five-year-old with a sticker, but 15-year-olds will laugh in your face.
When we focus on the cognitive science of learning, it’s easy to miss that the science of motivation is just as important. Experimental studies on how adults learn often don’t even address this issue, because adults have some level of choice in what they do and that is assumed.
For children and teenagers, it’s different. They often have no choice at all. What they want to learn doesn’t matter. Understanding the science of learning is futile if the learner doesn’t want to know. Cognitive science can’t apply to forced learning. What the learner thinks, matters.
It’s easy to blame teenagers, or their parents, or even the pandemic. It’s deeply frustrating when you are trying to help people who just don’t care. But what if this is actually the predictable result of our education system?
We ignore the science of motivation and our young people pay the price.
Talking of learning things because they'll be ‘important later on’, I fell for that in a big way fifty years ago. I was quite good at maths at school and believed people who told me that maths is an absolute essential. I even studied it, nearly failed my degree because it turned out that university-level maths has little to do with school maths, and became a maths teacher because ... well ... what else could I do? And, of course, I'd been told everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential. So I told my pupils that everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential.
I soon left teaching (still vaguely believing that everyone ought to do maths because it is an absolute essential, though initial doubts were at last beginning to sprout) and ended up in a technically-biased civil service job in water management working with computers. Just the sort of place where you'ld expect all that maths to come in useful. It didn't. At least not remotely such as to justify all that time I'd spent learning it, studying it and teaching it.
Now I believe that maths is an absolute essential for an extremely small proportion of people who are interested in it, and these days the rest of us can ask an AI bot.
Sorry if this sounds a bit exaggerated when compressed into a short comment, so take it with a pinch of salt. But the bottom line remains: Let's stop traumatizing people with fairy stories about having to do ... [replace the dots with a school subject of your choice] whether you're motivated or not because it's an absolute essential.
“What does education often do?” Henry David Thoreau asked in his journal, answering: “It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.” Indeed. The way I think I'll put it from now on, aside from this wonderful quote, is: Telling a young person what to be interested in is a fool-proof recipe for apathy.