Chapter 8:

The Proper Educational Motivation

Some time in my years of university teaching, a student came to me pleading that I talk to her son, who was always in trouble with his school. It seems that he would break out into unacceptable behaviour, and that it had got so bad that he was required, during recess, to stand at the shoulder of the teacher on duty for the whole of the break.

I was reluctant to get involved because I was pretty sure that any effort of mine would be futile. There would be no point in my speaking to the school – can you imagine a school listening to a philosopher of education? Particularly with my sort of message? And I was pretty sure that my take on the situation would just frustrate them both, rather than help.

But if it would be any help that someone might at least understand their plight, I might be able to do that. So I agreed, with some reluctance.

He said he didn’t want to misbehave. He just got so bored and frustrated. He got to the point that he couldn’t stand it. He would just break out.

I asked him what he really liked doing – what excited him, energized him, made him happy. I was prepared for a dull, non-committal answer. But he wasn’t a dull and mindless boy. He seemed quite awake.

When his uncle took him hunting and fishing. Hunting and fishing, apparently. I took a breath and wondered what significant areas of human learning couldn’t arise in connection with that. We talked, I think, about some of that – ballistics and weather, tides and seasons, habitats and the feeding habits of fish and game. Ecology, geography, sustainability.

I don’t recall talking about poetry and literature, art, history, anthropology, philosophy, politics and ethics, but of course they were all there in the wings breathing deeply, waiting for their opportunity. There were all the people he could meet, too, who would have so much to say. Perhaps even other boys. Perhaps even girls.

I have never forgotten the sense of the potential that exploded in my mind, or the sense of the utter wastefulness, the educational obtuseness, the dereliction.

It isn’t necessarily the dereliction or obtuseness of the teachers, of course. Had I talked to them, they might well have agreed with me, but painfully pleaded their complete impotence. The system just cannot accommodate his interests, his passion. It is our obtuseness in accepting such an appalling institutional arrangement. Our dereliction. This failure goes to the core of education. It goes to the core of respect. And it is we who sustain such institutions.

It is not just that learners learn best when the things they are to learn hook into their interests and passions; into their interest in having a good life of their own that they are able to live well. It is not just that things that are difficult to learn become much easier when we have a compelling and personal desire to learn them, and that it is easy to have the will to persist with difficult learning when we are vividly aware of the personal point of learning it. These things are true, but their educational relevance is not just as some technique for getting other people to learn what we want them to learn, and when we want them to learn it.

The point is that the only genuine educational motivation is that which should be about their good living from their point of view. Education should be about them, and not us – except when it is our education. This is the moral high ground; the educational high ground – putting the learner, and their duty to live well, their right to education and the education they have a right to . . . first.  When we set up systems that attempt to manipulate people through the learning that we want for them at the expense of the learning they can really see the point of, or are attracted to naturally out of their own interest and curiosity in their own lives, then we fail to respect them.

When cases like my boy with a “behavioural problem” emerge into the light, we should be scandalized. But we aren’t. They are labelled as the problem, and the failure. And the scale, the scope of the failure is much larger than is illustrated by the drama of a boy who is such a behavioural problem that he has to stand by the teacher when he is not in class, though I have heard other stories from other mothers since then that suggest that there are far too many of these ones, too. It is hard to tell how extensive the failure is, but it will include, perhaps equally seriously, those who conform. Those, even, who are ordinarily counted successes.

My doctor of some years ago, who was interested in my work and a good friend, once suggested that I should talk to the Society of General Practitioners, because they had a problem. The problem, apparently, is that it is all too common for doctors, once they graduate, to never want to study ever again. So they don’t keep up to date. That should worry all of us, but hardly be surprising.

Doctors are the successes of our system, and they have learned its lessons well. They have had a lot more schooling than most people, and been coerced and manipulated through it all like everyone else except those with an excessive desire to please. The more schooling you have had the more damage is likely to have been done both to your educational motivation and your intellectual independence; your curiosity and your willingness to learn for your own sake, and to take personal responsibility for the truth of what you believe. But university is full of students just itching to get out of there. The achievement of graduation isn’t always about the good things that have been learned. It is also that it is finally over with.

The problem arises from the wholly inadequate way in which we have endeavoured to implement education. Universal, compulsory state schooling was developed on a model that was nicely congruent with the nineteenth century factory system, but was conceived and pioneered in Prussia – a militaristic, regimented society that had yet to industrialize. The war machinery of the day, and the cultural support that they needed, had very similar requirements of indoctrination and training to the growing industrial factory system.

Such institutions and purposes are the last places one would go to find how to cultivate individual curiosity, intellectual independence of thought, initiative, or respect for difference. Where education is concerned then, Western countries turned away from the values that have now come to characterize them – freedom of thought, critical independence and the intrinsic worth of the human being – and they chose, instead, to process the young into conformity en masse.

The curriculum isn’t drawn out of each learner on the basis of their own understanding of their own lives.  It is decided at various levels of management and serves the interests of various other parties – the State, with its preoccupation with behavioural conformity and wealth-creation, and the potential employer, with their special interest in workplace compliance and human capital. At best the learners only have token input into the assessment of their own learning, as if their interest in what they learn isn’t of the first importance. As a factory, the first concern of assessment is “quality control”. Standards must be maintained.

Because the factory can’t cater for this boy’s passionate interest in tracking animals and snapper behaviour while also catering for the girl in the next seat, whose passion is horses and fashion design, the school requires that these passions be sublimated and traded in for a common emotional currency. Praise and rewards or the fear of disaster at the hands of those in control. In this way it deepens the power of group approval and conformity; of caring what other people think.

We are forced to face the fact that we are locked up in schools – in compulsory schooling. We aren’t free to roam the hills and streams and inlets with or without our uncle. We must reconcile ourselves to quite a different fate. And we must adopt quite a different, second-hand form of motivation – pleasing others; pleasing the authorities, just like any other prisoner. Our true passions must be put on hold, suppressed. Our proper educational motivation – our native desire to learn what matters to us – must be denied We must be domesticated.

This is consistent, of course, with the world of work we are being designed for. The second-hand motivation of praise and approval will be replaced by the second-hand reward of money. We might be lucky, and like some aspects of our job, but if we don’t there is always the money. It will pay (and we will be paid) to fake enthusiasm, and we get quite good at it. With this sort of preparation for work, don’t expect passionate commitment or initiative in the workplace either.

In the light of our practice, it is absurd to hear all that bright and enthusiastic talk about cultivating a love of learning, when we do so much – quite systematically – to thwart it. The very boldness of our hypocrisy should arrest us in our tracks. But it doesn’t. We are so used to these structures that we don’t even notice.

Perhaps this wouldn’t matter too much if our own mastery of our own lives didn’t matter, and our decisions in life weren’t important to the meaning and fulfilment we stand to get out of it. It particularly wouldn’t matter if we weren’t supposed to take responsibility for ourselves and our choices. It would certainly matter less if we abandoned all that talk about the choice of a career, about what you are going to be when you grow up, and just got assigned our lives. But if we are to be the makers of our own lives, and responsible for what we do with them, it matters. It is at the heart of what matters.

A proper educational development would be one which was built out of the learner’s own perception of what mattered, what was worthwhile, what they wanted their lives to be about, what they wanted in their lives – at the time.  A proper education would take these things and develop on them, enhancing the passion, the curiosity, the potential mastery inherent in them, all the while challenging them at their cutting edges.

It would challenge them with alternative possibilities and problems – alternative possibilities and problems and potentials for mastery that were real to the learner, at their point of understanding and development. When they got to the point of wanting to be doctors they would also be full blown independent learners who sought out other enthusiastic learners. They certainly wouldn’t be trying to please anyone else. Medical training could then pour gasoline on the fire of that passion. Their teachers would just have to try to keep up.

Getting them to such a point would appear, of course, to require a quite unreasonable level of involvement of an educator with each learner. But that depends upon the degree to which the learner is both permitted to participate in the decision-making, and is equipped to do so. It also depends upon the idea that the  learner is an isolated individual – not a member of a community of learners with some differences in educational maturity but often working in collaboration. In other words, it is presuming conventional schooling conditions.

Consider, for instance, the remarkable fact that for all of our years of schooling – twelve years and up – the one thing that it should be obvious that we are taught almost nothing about in all that time is education itself. I struggle to get my head around this one.

But the simple fact is that for all those years surely the one thing we most obviously do not study is the institution we spend all those hours in, its purpose, and its ideals. We certainly don’t study it critically, though the critical literature about it is considerable. We don’t study its history, though it goes back well over two thousand years. We don’t study the questions that have to be asked in constructing its contents and processes, though it is a huge field of research, attracting huge tax-payer resources.

We come out of it at the end, most of us not even understanding the difference between education and schooling. Given that level of ignorance, of course we can’t contribute intelligently to our own educational decision-making while we are in the system. Even as adult learners, we will only be capable of making the simplest of educational choices.

I am not going to spend time now pondering this omission of education from our education, though it is one of the most amazing and telling things about the way we have failed to properly institutionalize anything truly worthwhile. Instead, I am going to suggest that if you want educational development at all, then the first thing you must attend to is the educational understanding of learners from as early as they are capable of thinking about their own learning – which is in early childhood. And I do mean educational understanding and awareness as I have been discussing it so far throughout this book.

This understanding must be critical, it must be philosophical, it must be true to their lives, and the need to defer to authority and power must be kept to a minimum. This educational understanding will, of course, give a priority to their own understanding of what they are already making of their lives and are likely to get fired up about (or their search for such things). Obviously, if this was ever going to happen, it would be necessary for “educators” themselves also to have a reasonably sophisticated educational understanding – compared to the next-to-nothing that they have now.

Enhanced and evolving educational awareness and understanding on the part of the learner should equip them to play a better part in the design and organisation of their own learning, increasing their independence as learners and obviating much of the close managerial paternalism that we are accustomed to see in conventional schooling.

A second element that would enable a reduction of the heavy-handed managerialism and paternalism of the factory system would be a great mixing up of the ranges of age and maturity in collaborative learning teams, so that a greater part of the collective educational process involved the sharing of what learners already know, or think they know. This is an important feature of collaborative input which helps to enable effective collective inquiry rather than the often spurious authority of expertise which goes with being an adult and an official.

Schooling typically involves a conveyor belt of age-cohorts moving through the system locked into their age-group on a production-line. Sometimes these cohort groups have been homogenized even more managerially by gender or ability. These artificial groupings give the lie to all the talk of the importance of schools in bringing young people together so that they can rub shoulders with the sorts of difference they are likely to experience in society. After years of being locked in with their age peers they go into the workforce where they must work with people who may be forty years older than they are. It is a recipe for ageism and historical and developmental insensitivity.

In contrast, the old-fashioned one-room school house contained the entire range of elementary school ages in one class, and it was known for the responsible and caring family atmosphere that it created. These schools – often fiercely defended by the parents of the district – weren’t closed down, in the end, for educational reasons of course, but for “economies of scale”.

There is also an old piece of educational wisdom, particularly in universities, that says that the best way to learn your subject is to teach it. We waste that resource, only sparingly giving it out to some of our graduate students. Systematically we underestimate the potential of the young, and what we may learn from them, which means that we stunt the potential of people in their maturity.

These remarks are not a blueprint for an alternative system, though they are intended to be suggestive. There are other and deeper changes that need to occur in our thinking. If we are to maintain contact with the true motivation of the learner we need to revise our ideas and our practice about who is to be the rightful determinant of what is true, or right, or good. It is the learner, of course, and not the teacher, or the school board, or the curriculum planner.

The problem here is vivid in our typical methods of assessment – which have to do with what the learner can demonstrate, or what they are able to perform. It does not, and cannot have to do with what they believe, or care about, or are committed to. Their job, in our system, is to give the authorities what the authorities want. There is no way of compelling belief, or conviction, or whether the learner will ever again act on what they learn once they are let out. Compliance is ensured only while the controls of the system are in place.

But education should have to do with where the learner really lives, with how they construct their minds and their lives, with what they actually do make of it all and decide to do with it. As such, for better or worse, it is their judgment of truth, their decision to believe, the reasons they respond to, or create, or find compelling, that count in the end. Not ours.

We must spend less time wondering about how to stuff things into their minds, and more time considering how to help them create good minds for themselves. That is what they need if they are to develop their own worthwhile lives for themselves and in their own way, and it is what we need in each other, if we are ever to hope to create a democratic society worthy of the name. If we look at that closely, we will find that we need quite a different approach from our current factory system. (1)

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(1) Further reading

Dewey, John. Interest and Effort in Education. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Soutthern Illinois Press, 1913.

Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.

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© R. Graham Oliver, 2018