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.