I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation is exactly what killed said self-motivation. "Grades are all that matter, and mine ain't anywhere near good enough to go to a good college, so why bother trying?"
It's something I'm actively working on trying to fix to this day, but old habits die hard.
I don't see how the second half of the sentence follows from the first half. Did that "not" slip in by accident? Or do you consider a PhD in pure maths to be evidence of not having academic ability?
-- Yours, offended holder of PhD in pure maths :)
Or even worse when teachers decide it isn’t worth you trying because they failed to inspire you.
I think this has shifted somewhat to the standardized tests mattering quite a bit now these days.
Should we not consider alternative methods or options for education? What should everything be concentrated into one public model that follows one national standard?
The course load in Eng. or in Grad School - now that can be overwhelming to the point of exhaustion.
Allowing children to pick what they want to explore and modeling the education after exploration is part of the baseline for Montessori education.
But this:
" Imagine if you could have skipped all those English classes back then. Guess what? You would be learning it all right now!"
No, no way.
It's a total misunderstanding of education to contemplate this.
Education is not 'some facts and things you learn that you may use later'.
Education at HS level is much more fundamental than that, particularly English.
It's about communicating, developing ideas, writing. Not only is it essential, it takes quite a lot of time and effort, and it's hard to just 'pick up'.
I have an Angel investor friend who just set up his own basic website (simple is fine) and wrote his own little intro copy. It's atrocious. Basically, in four sentences in writing, he reveals his own lack of education to anyone who cares to read. I mean - it's not 'that that bad' - but it really is sub professional and embarrassing. He's otherwise very smart, very educated, but it turns out he can't string together a few tightly coherent sentences to make a point.
There's no 'going back'. Both of should have paid more attention in school.
I do agree with he cadence, I think that school days should be shorter, and there should be more music and sports, shop class and longer term projects.
"Decent" high school grades are seldom adequate to even meet acceptance requirements for "good" colleges, let alone actually compete with the straight-A students also applying to said colleges.
Not that this really does anything to address the broader point: that "get into college because you'll make more money" is one of many extrinsic motivators American schools seem to push in order to strangle intrinsic motivators.
See how stupid that sounds
High schoool English, Geography, History and Math is referenced as easy by many students. Typical student does not have a problem to pass that class.
English, Math, History and Geography at the high school level are fairly straight forward, and the subjects are important to a rounded character. They really are not hard.
Most of Grad school is utterly gruelling, there isn't time to sleep, students pulled in different directions, and studying mostly arcane subjects that really are not important to anyone.
Theoretically the courses are probably designed to allow most people to succeed.
I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection.
Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it is necessarily inadequate for every individual kid, it can also occupy too much time and deprive them from the opportunity to experiment and explore to their niche in society in their unstructured free time.
Be careful making assumptions like that. Suicidal tendencies made it through evolutionary selection, after all.
True lack of motivation both consumes resources and doesn’t contribute to back to the individual or group survival. It is a mode of being that approximates non-living with extra costs. And to be clear I am not talking about a temporary state like depression, or a disease state like chronic depression. I just can’t imagine a permanently stagnant reservoir of genes really passing on without any form of intrinsic motivation. Even at the lowest end of mammalian bioeconomics like sloths, there is motivation, if is just fulfilled it with a different strategy.
Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless. Evolution takes place on much larger timescales than the changes in our environment. 3000 years is almost nothing in terms of meaningful evolution through natural selection, and the world has drastically changed in the last 400, or 150, or even 70!
We are not talking about why people might be committing suicide now, we are talking about how the genetic disposition for suicadility might have passed along. To give context, 50% of the people will seriously have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime for about a week or two (so few actually do).
> Likewise, your evolutionary arguments for motivation are equally useless.
You misunderstand. We are not talking about an environment - gene mismatch, therefore the timescales are not relevant at all. I am positing a near impossibility of complete lack of intrinsic motivation to have passed genetically, regardless of timescale or even species.
The argument would propose that desensitization is mostly preferable, which is probably false if you look at particularly gifted people.
Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take.
I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems to get it right by using former students as TAs. Although then it happens against payment. I'd argue for simply making it part of the regular curriculum.)
Mind you, this is from reading about it, I don't have first hand experience how the system works. I can however attest to the effectiveness of tutoring in higher education. Tutors (typically grad students) often understand much better the subtle points that are difficult to understand in a topic, I guess because it's been more recent that they have learnt it. There also seems to be less reluctance for students to ask questions of their tutor then their lecturer.
I think higher education in Finland isn't anything special, if you actually want a quality education you'll have to go abroad (like the actually successful people do here anyway). Even the arguably best schools aren't that good. People mostly coast through them once they get in and just want the piece of paper at the end. Good parties though.
Years later in the work force they'll wake up and see they barely make more money then an electrician with their fancy degree because of the insane tax policies here. What's the point of having a nice degree if you're still gonna have a moderately low salary compared to other European countries?
Interesting comment in a thread about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation...
> Even if most students suck as tutors [...]
Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. I'd argue that you can't say that you understand something unless you can explain it to someone a step away from your current level of depth in the domain.
Now, imagine every developer spend 5%, 1% of their (coding) time learning how to teach or communicate ideas in a succinct, empathetic way.
We'd not only have less 40yo ranting at some 15yo project, because they used React, but also the quality of our work would improve drastically.
I’m not sure what you have against people in their 40s but, it might be worth it to spend 5% of your time learning to respect and have empathy for them.
Side note, people in their 40s aren’t old. Damn.
Context: As I was replying to this post I saw another one where a bunch of senior 10x developers were bashing a 15yo who came up with a personal project, because the poor guy/gal used React(!).
I mean, surely we can do better than that. I'm really tired of seeing senior engineers, often fairly intelligent people acting as if being kind to others wasn't their responsibility because how smart they perceive themselves. HN is a prime example of that (despite some amazing content that can be found here too).
I'm sorry if my comment hurt you in any way. I hope it's a bit more clear now. (I won't edit the parent comment—to keep the context of your reply and remind myself to be more specific).
> Side note, people in their 40s aren’t old. Damn.
Personal note: I hope so!
You dont improve peoples skills in general just by throwing them into water and hoping that swimming happens by itself.
The exception to this is skills that will kill you if you get in over your head. But that's a rather small category of skills, and it only calls for supervision, not avoidance.
As for tutoring itself: it increases the skill level of both the teacher and the student. The student gets 1-on-1 directed focus, and the teacher is forced to reflect more deeply on his own skills. Having students teach each other is very beneficial at all levels of education.
As someone who was a kid in that position, no it did not increased my skill in thing I was supposed to teach at all. That might happen when you are teaching interested peer at similar level, does not happen when you are teaching someone uninterested and someone who has much lower skills.
> For example, toddlers learn primarily by mimicking their parents, replicating their behaviour.
That body of knowledge wears off after you are like 3. Then explicit teaching by parents and other adults becomes much more prominent. And even toddlers are explicit taught a lot.
> Very bad analogy. Yes, for almost all skills, just doing them improves your proficiency.
Only up to the pretty low level for most people and most activities. After that, you reach a plateau.
1. Make the student interested.
2. Improve the student's skills.
Of course the student is uninterested and has low skills when you start out. Otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point to the activity.
You might argue that it's not the tutor's job to make the student interested, but it is. The primary thing that sets good tutors apart from bad ones is their ability to motivate their students. To care. To fiendishly ask questions that are just out of reach of the students ability, or will reveal some tiny flaw in the students understanding. This type of thing engages everyone when done well.
(I did have a source for this but I seem to have lost it. That is a shame because it was a really good article.)
What you are describing is out of range for peer tutoring (child-to-child) which is what I was thinking of. For children, the motivation for the task doesn't need to come from the subject matter itself, the very fact that a friend/peer is working with you can be all the motivation you need.
Which is why literally this whole setup where you have good students tutoring weak ones is a trap and punishment for the good one.
Expecting well behaved kid to be that emphatetic mind reading tutor is waaay beyond age appropriate expectations and abilities of typical kid.
Nowhere did I state I expected any expert tutors from children. I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing. It might not even be better in all cases, but on average, the evidence tells us it is.
Plus, this is your attitude toward kid tutoring another kid: as a tutor, you have exactly two jobs: Make the student interested. Improve the student's skills. And you have this expectation placed on a kid.
> I merely said that something, anything at all, is better than nothing.
That something is to put responsibility on a kid and then blame a kid for not tutoring well enough it it fails. And I am telling you that it is unfair to punish the good kid by doing this. Because this plan is not caring about the "good" kid at at all.
The tutors is not improving own recall. The tutor is dealing with social problem outside of tutors control or abilities. And no, good student kid wont be able to individualize teaching better then adult teacher. The good student kid will struggle with the whole motivational thing much much more.
That's not the alternative, either, because nobody will pay for one adult teacher per student. The alternative is no tutoring at all.
It is absolutely not solution to lack of teachers. Even teacher having 15 bad students the same time is better then one kid trying to be tutor.
It is also quite unfair expectation to be placed on a kid.
Education problems are indeed money problems.
The one kid that I ever encountered which I didn't find something that I could leverage to get their intrinsic motivation was a very young syrian refugee child who must have been so severeley traumatized he barely remembered my name despite seeing me every day – he was 6 years old. With him it was like working with someone who had dementia, you could only get him for very short periods and do something and he would completely lose it the day after. Most times it seemed like he wasn't there at all mentally.
But for all the others it was just about finding a way to connect certain topics to their field of interest. E.g. xkcd-style calculations for catapult with the "mad professor" as a trojan horse to physics he tended to hate before that, doing record sales calculations with the hiphop guy, writing a text about a soccer game with the soccer guy etc.
Of course sometimes they just wanted to do nothing, but slowly connecting the stuff they were forced to do before with their interests was something that showed tremendous effect. They were gladly coming every day (most because it was worse at home). If someone is stressed they cannot focus unless you make them care and motivate them.
Edit: as you can imagine, this is not the easy route to do that job. The easy route is more authoritarian.
This is a false dichotomy that gets reinforced everywhere to the detriment of all students. There is no reason those things should be mutually exclusive, but we make it so by the power of our collective expectations.
Lots of people are discouraged and pushed away from their areas of interest because they aren't seen as fitting a stereotype or mold. Some people never even get a chance to discover that they have academic interests, and are effectively placed on a "remedial" track from the time they enter the school system because of their background. The messaging is that they cannot succeed without external motivation, which sets them up for failure.
On the other side of the coin, it also contributes to the unhealthy pressures advanced students face. Building rigid assumptions into the education system about how students spend their leisure time is part of what kills diversity.
We grossly overestimate the amount of kids who fall into this group, maybe because we're priviledged enough exclude ourselves from it.
> I think the school system is fairly good at forcing all children to learn at least a little about all subjects.
Dude, ca. 20% of people in the US are either illiterate or functionally illiterate. How is that good?[1]
Unless, given your previous point, they're too busy playing computer games or getting high on Satan's lettuce?
Pardon the sarcasm, but this is an extremely dangerous mindset as it distracts us from the actual problem.
Edit: source
[1] https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=How-Serious-Is-A...
It’d be great to solve internal motivation issue. It’s damn hard though. Forcing some of them to learn in other ways is better than nothing while we come up with a solution for the core issue.
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
Totally unlike adults then.
"erziehen", if translated literally, means "to pull", "er" is something like "to act" while "ziehen" means "pull"
Sometimes it feels like that, that it is necessary to pull someone into a certain direction in order to better that person. And this is usually not easy to do.
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19...
And annoyingly, when I bring this proposal up, most people talk about how important it is for learning to be intrinsically motivated.
It depends on the culture of the place the school system is applied in. This kind of blanket utilitarianism by way of school is a sad state for society as a whole. In a country like Canada we have a sordid past, very recently, when implementing the residential school system [0].
That's the more extreme case but I'd argue that elements of that exist in every school system when applied in a one-size-fits-all fashion and when that system has a monopoly on education.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
Drive is great. Leverage it heavily as a manager.
But when it comes to kids, the problems I see are that (a) cognitively speaking, children are not tiny adults; and (b) if you want them to be successful and happy adults, you need to give kids the ability to work through mountains of "I Need To Do This Even Though It Sucks"
Cognitive development is an amazing process to watch -- you can see as brains grow and develop a wide variety of skills we take for granted.
But what that means is that you can't treat a six-year-old as an adult.
Their thinking is likely highly egocentric, because they have not yet developed the ability to realize that "my feelings and wants" are different from "other peoples' feelings and wants".
In their world, when they like Pokemon, they literally believe that everybody in the world feels the same way about Pokemon that they do. They just haven't yet gained the ability to handle that concept.
So, up to age eleven or so, you need to put enough structure around children to deal with their cognitive development path. Rules that are consistently enforced are critical (it's also good if those rules, in fact, make sense), with a gradual loosening of constraints as the child grows the ability to handle greater responsibilities.
This path continues from eleven -- when, cognitively, your child is now a functioning adult -- onwards towards the age of majority.
You still need to provide structure, but with enough freedom and ability to bend-or-change the rules such that the child can learn how to make their own decisions. Your goal is ramp them towards the full set of adult responsibilities, as quickly as they are able to handle it.
The problem with a lot of "traditional" education is that it failed to do the latter in a lot of ways -- rigid structure until age of majority, and then bam!, you're an adult, good luck.
This is compounded by how much regulation and how little slack there is in society. In the 70s, teenagers commonly brought rifles to school (because they were on the shooting team, or going hunting afterwards). Nowadays, kids are getting expelled for accidentally forgetting a tiny, micro-sized pocketknife.
The problem with "modern" education is that there is no expectation that you will ever assume responsibility. If you've dealt with a lot of recent graduates, you probably know what I mean. They have been denied much of the experience required for them to mature as adults, all in the name of keeping them "safe".
Including being "safe" from boredom. Which relates to giving kids the ability to get through mountains of drudgery.
That skill is so critical.
And I didn't really master it until I was an adult, much to my disadvantage.
If Elon Musk and every one of his employees were to vanish tomorrow, I'd be sad. SpaceX is cool. But my life would go on.
If the organization that handles sewage for my city were to vanish tomorrow, I would soon be, quite literally, in a world of shit.
I doubt that working for a sewage treatment plant offers much in the way of Autonomy. Mastery, perhaps? Purpose, absolutely.
And I doubt most kids grow up dreaming of being a waste engineer.
It's a hard job, and it demands grit. But that job makes modern life possible, and I don't see us setting up kids to be able to tackle both kinds of challenges.
I wouldn't be so sure. I think Deming (and, perhaps more concretely, the Toyota Production System) has showed us that there is a surprising amount of autonomy that can be unlocked even for the most menial roles.
Treating low-level workers with respect, training them well, and listening to what they have to say is a mutually beneficial agreement. They are the people who know what is really going on in the processes they control. They are (or at least should be!) the most informed people in the room when it comes to decisions around those processes.
In exchange for their valuable input, low-level workers should, then, get a piece of autonomy. If they have figured out a way to prevent mistakes, or a more efficient procedure to accomplish their objective, they can do it their way – with the support of management. Of course, if they know they aren't respected or listened to, it will never occur to them even to think about improvements.
Really, it's two sides of the same coin.
Adults are merely large children.
Edit: I did read the rest of your comment and generally agree whole heartedly.
And I do know a frighteningly large number of thirty-odd-year old children. :)
How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?
A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.
I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).
I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.
It covers empathy (actually listening and confirming feelings) but is largely about how to enable extrinsic motivation, through encouraging autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
One rather concrete example is that the authors argue it is no good to say, e.g. "if you take a bath you'll get this nice gift" or "if you don't take a bath I will remove your video gaming time for the day."
More effective, according to the authors, are to give a choice, even if it is somewhat of a forced one: "I want you to take a bath. Do you want to bathe with your boat or your duck?"
This, then, would speak to the same desire to explore as the hidden option in the article. (Or, the way I view it having read Drive: this gives the child a hint of autonomy.)
This can be so surprisingly effective that it is almost scary. And while I'm at it: it works with many adults too.
Use with caution. Leadership is good and kids needs to go to bed at night, but manipulation isn't what you want to be remembered for.
Other nice-to-knows to be used with caution:
- as kids start to negotiate, add slack for negotiations.
- "catch them" when they do something right, reward it immediately (with encouraging words, a hug, increased trust - or even a piece of chocolate)
- look for the intentions - or anything that was right even if the intent wasn't there:
-- tried to do something right but failed? Good! (On the other side: there's few things as discouraging as gettig a scolding when you thought you did something good.)
-- used to slam the door but closed it carefully for some reason (hands full, in the phone, etc)? Good.
About that time you need to explain why we have regular baths.
Man, I remember when I started deciding things for myself... at 16-17! 'so you want to go to prep school, university, or eng. school?' WTF I don't even know what I want for dinner... I feel this is something that needs to be trained the soonest possible. See what you feel when asked to chose. Decide something. See how you feel when you've taken option A or B (or feel when you don't like any of the available options! And learn to think outside the box!). See what happens when you change your mind before you started A. Or after you've started B and think 'I should have done A'. With your parents, friends, teachers. It's amazing how teaching this to my little kids with a positive and caring attitude has shown me how hard and important it all is! And it's even harder for collective decisions!
Something amazing for twin children: they also have the opportunity (or the burden sometimes) to see how their choices affect others and how important negociating, defending, compromising is.
Those books that GP cited are gold. The whole Positive Education movement is, I think, a way to a better future, with balanced and reasonable members of the citizenry. And I ache for all the children with have parents that don't even have the tiniest bit of empathy and interest for their children.
The fake choice thing, though, never EVER worked with my kids.
sometimes they'll talk, then mutter to confusion then emit blips because they heard words coming from you, then all of a sudden they'll have a burst of excitement again.
Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same.
Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
If your kid is good at something and you want them to lose interest, encourage or reward them for doing the thing :)
Or force them to do it.
Just like school system does with learning.
> Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe.
I'd just want to add that according to Drive, training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line type managers wanted, for a very long time (and in many cases probably still do, sadly.)
Damnit, if Punished by Rewards contradicts this, I have to read it now, don't I?
Alfie Kohn acknowledges that where the work is low skill, very dull, requires little collaboration, rewards generally work for as long as the rewards continue.
But employee of the month? Stack ranking? Basically they're just going to destroy any intrinsic motivation, and lead to teams where people are reluctant to collaborate.
It teaches its subjects to do the thing but only if they get the reward and never otherwise. To comply, but only when watched, and to act in secret when fulfilling their true needs.
His book focuses on parenting and one can see how punishment and rewards impact this most important relationship and negatively impact intrinsic motivation in exchange for the illusion of control.
Genuine question: What do you do if you want them to get better then?
"You have been trying to find that bug for hours. That's true perseverance!"
"I like the sound effects you added. They really draw me into the game even more."
"It sounds like you're using a technology you haven't before. Trying is the only way to learn new things."
"This runs so smoothly!"
Also, ask questions.
"How did you get the enemy to follow my character?"
"I feel like the game is unfair when I die here. Is there anything you can do to make this section not so difficult?"
"I understood what I was meant to do right away. Can you think of why that was?"
Note how you don't even have to be positive when you do it this way. Simply sharing the experience goes a long way. Encouraging critical thought and decision-making makes it even better.
I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.
The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.
We all love to say that we want creative free thinking individuals.. but come on now - currently the society is mostly composed of conformed (without this society probably would not function, at least as it does now) and in a lesser extent the obedient.
The creative and free thinking individuals push us all foward and we would not advance without them, but the majority is different.
Schooling system is not what it is by accident.
Simply interacting with other people is what makes humans follow meaningful rules. That happens whether or not we're rewarded for being good dogs in the eyes of adults.
Conformity to arbitrary procedures and sets of rules is not helpful anywhere, and that's what school gives us.
We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.
Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.
Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.
I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.
> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?
As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."
The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.
Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)
I would be interested if you have some pointers. I've tried searching a bit but didn't hit anything.
Intuitively there is a lot of things that I want intrinsically to do, but I will do a calculation wether I'll have external motivations/rewards to do it and decide from there.
For instance I intrincically like programming. It still doesn't mean my intrinsic motivation to program disappeared because I get paid, nor that I won't be exploring thing that I am curious about and try to align external motivation to help me explore them.
> if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late.
I know this case study, but as a parent I don't see this on a personal level. To put it on a different case, you get fined for parking on priority/handicaped places, but don't see rich people everywhere abusing priority parking. Some do, but most don't, so at least a majority of them don't see it as just an economic transaction. As usual, reality is more complicated.
Under that hypothesis, the salary is there to take physical needs as a motivator off the table. If an employee has to worry about physical needs, there's no room at all for any other concern.
Once the salary is sufficient to no longer be a point of worry (will I afford my mortgage, can I support my spouse, etc) only then will additional money serve as extrinsic motivation.
(Which of course spells disaster for things like performance bonuses, which (a) are impossible to target at the right people (see Deming for more on that) and (b) literally designed to stop coming, reducing motivation overall.)
But your salary doesn’t change if you work hard or slack. It’s not a reward for performance.
Similar to how you’d die without breathing but you don’t feel rewarded for every breath. You wouldn’t breathe more than someone else to get more alive.
Maybe not in an immediate sense, but working hard ostensibly makes it more likely to get promoted to a position with a higher salary, while slacking ostensibly makes it more likely to get demoted or fired.
Of course, I say "ostensibly" because the real world doesn't really work like that, with hard workers getting shafted and lazy pricks schmoozing and politicking their way into the very positions those hard workers should've gotten. It'd be disheartening, but it happens to be a decent treatment for my impostor syndrome: everyone else is an impostor, too, so might as well just play along.
If you want to play the violin beautifully, you have to practice for 10 years, there's no way around it.
If you want to do important things, you have to train in all sorts of capacities, and put in a lot of sweat.
One of the things that differentiates humans from beasts is that we have at least some sense of higher purpose and many of us derive considerable fulfilment from that.
For the most part, most of our education is necessary - and the ability to focus, to plan, to think beyond just a few steps, to control one's desires and emotions, to concentrate and balance one's life energies - this requires education and maturity.
Yes, it can be stifling in some ways, that's ok, we want our doctors and accountants (mostly) to be small-c conservatives. Others can write Operas.
But none of it comes without a formal journey at least in some capacity.
It's a neat experiment but I think it's hard to determine the results. The novelty of exploration in that context just might not be 'novelty' from the adults perspective. Try trading rewards for truly novel things, like, jumping out of planes, I wonder what the result would be.
I don't know the source of this, but I remember reading that most people who become good at things, by practicing for 10 years or whatever, were intrinsically motivated to do so. It's not a process of "want to be good -> force self to practice -> become good", but more of "want to practice -> become good". Can't remember if this was just conjecture, and I'm not a citeable source myself, but it seems like a more likely story. I know I've heard stories of talented people who got where they are because they spent all day noodling on the guitar, or writing programs, but I've heard less stories about people who didn't really enjoy the practice but forced themselves into it via willpower.
Not to say that "just noodling" is all that the person needed, or that no willpower was required, but that the process might be more intrinsic for the people who are actually going to become great anyway.
Growing up, I found that those who ran on pure extrinsic factors with all discipline and no enjoyment either stopped or were stunted by locally optimal decisions. On the other hand, those who went on to study in university and play professionally seemed to derive the same obsessive enjoyment from their craft as I would a video game.
Do you think these data points further prove your point about emotional maturity? Or is there something more universal, that true success requires a fierce passion?
Everything in moderation.
It takes at least 5 years of learning piano to get good enough to enjoy it. IMO this is why adults almost never take it up - we're just not prepared to invest in something that takes so much work with such a distant payoff
Rocksmith is a guitar playing video game that can be fun from day one. I don't see why similar concepts couldn't be used to teach just about any musical instrument.
We finish 50 million kids in school each year.
100's of millions have been through the US system alone over it's history.
If this was simply true then I feel like there'd be some evidence by now.
Yes we can do better schooling for some kids, and yes there are certainly improvements, but after 100's of year of doing it, it's not going to be a country wide system of let kids just have more freedom.
The best improvement we know of is cohorts matter. Which is a zero sum game.
I went to a school without grades. It encourages cultivating a love of learning. There was concrete feedback on quality of work and assessments of knowledge (tests). But no public grading scale. It’s been awarded 3 blue ribbon awards and consistently outperformed its grading-based peers.
Cohorts.
If all the students you schooled with could easily come from the other available systems and your school could only expel them at the same rates as the other schools I'd be happier.
Extrinsic motivation, IMO, is akin to an exchange or bargain, you have to develop a sense or skill to know how to make them.
ps: more generally I'm very curious about the topic of 'pedagogics' and also the way to create harmonious, high level work environment between people (all motivated by few years of seeing nothing but drag, pain and waste in too many workplaces). If you know board, MLists or else, ping me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiW_l848t8&list=PL463AA90FD...
As a teen, I think I would've agreed with you on this, but looking back personally, I think boundaries inspired my creativity to break out of them.
Obedience to hierarchy around stuff collecting is extrinsic.
One must learn facts and emotional character to tell grandpa go away.
We’re far to servile to decades old delusions of grandeur.
Extreme ownership of social agency by one circular meme isn’t good enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#General_conce...
The only person I've heard say "mastery" are Betsy devos (when she was getting grilled by warren at her senate confirmation) and some religious conservatives i know that homeschool their children.
My general impression is that it's a marketing gimmick by carter schools that want to show they're somehow innovating in education. This is probably all horse shit as the longer term outcomes in devos type schools are really bad (see: michigan).
anyway, it's a flag. probably a big red one.
I doubt it's taken seriously by regular school teachers whos models come from Columbia university.
> The Chicago Mastery Learning Reading program was criticized for a focus on testing. A concern is that children were taught to pass tests without a focus on enduring skills. The duration of the retention of skills was questioned.
Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic motivators stop coming in, there is no desire left to do the task. Intrinsic motivation is practically infinite, as long as the environment is set up right to enable it.
Extrinsic motivation also tends to produce behaviour that does the bare minimum to get the reward (or avoid the negative consequences) whereas intrinsic motivation is what makes us want to excel.
Of course, I've skipped many important points and not countered any counterargument here, but I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.
But the worst part of it all?
The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.